Re: Bridget
I drove the car about two miles on Wednesday night to the drug store and noticed the temp gage wasn't coming up. It was laying on 90 as I crossed the mile mark. Usually by then it's well off the peg.
Dang Smith's dual gauge, I thought. This is the kind with the tube fulla gas and the bulb at one end you stick in the coolant, and the tube inevitably kinks somewhere and leaks the gas out and makes the $200+ gauge be no good. (You know they're good when they leak oil from the capillary tube onto your right knee).
Anyway I got my nephew's birthday card, got 3/4 home and the needle just got to about 120. That's when the green light came on, indicating the fan was working. That worried me because the fan should not have needed to go on, and also because the light was extra bright, meaning that the Suby temp sensor was reading about 210-220. Which is unpossible in that short a trip on a mild spring evening.
Got home and felt the radiator, which was cold. Bad news.
Probably I screwed up. A few weeks ago it was nice so I rolled her out of the garage, checked the oil, started her up and took my wife to Ritas for gelatis. Nice. No problem.
What I did not do was open all the bleeder screws in the cooling system first.
If you ask David Stroud about this, he will tell you stories. OK, he'll tell you stories anyway, probably, but this is an important story: Always open the damn bleeder screws before operating a Suby-powered Plastic Clown Car that has been parked for a long time. Always.
So I probably had a bubble in the system. They can and do develop over the long winter. The bubble probably made its way to the worst possible spot, somewhere in the left head. Air there means a hot spot forms, and pretty soon, with the extra expansion, you've got blown head gasket.
From there you just get more bubbles: the combustion gasses blow into the cooling system, displacing more coolant, pushing it into the overflow tank. And then pushing it out of the overflow tank.
Next morning I bled the air out of the system. It needed it. Then I ran the car a minute to see if the gauge would work. I was hoping it wouldn't: hoping the gauge was bad. Or hoping in the alternative that the bubble had been where the gauge bulb was, and now that was fixed and it would work as normal. After about 15 minutes idling it went to about 120 again and then the fan came on. Crap.
Now there was coolant dripping out the front. Checked all the hose connections--all good. Traced it to the top of the overflow tank.
OK this was bad but it's not conclusive: maybe the thermostat was stuck closed. Hot coolant was expanding out of the top of the engine and trying to make its way to the radiator, but the thermostat wouldn't let any cold coolant in from the bottom like it should, so the rad stayed cool and the overflow tank overflowed.... Not likely, but oh-so-much-better-an-option, car-fix wise. On Friday I pulled it out and tested it on the stove. It works.
So that leaves head gasket.