SBF 302 5.0 Coolant leak

Sometimes you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say "Skervey you are an idiot, and over reacted."

So Im glad I messed with the car this afternoon, the plan was to rip everything apart tonight and rebuild tomorrow. But I thought id give it a last chance and tighten all the hose clamps and sure enough one of the heater lines was not all the way tight...

So I get that done and cleaned all the coolant off the timing cover and then I stuffed some paper towels down in the spots I thought it might be leaking so I could pinpoint the leak. Took a test drive with the car and got it up to temp and nothing... Took another test drive and still nothing. Took the car to go get gas and I let the car a bit above normal temp but well within the safe zone. Then revved the crap out of it taking it up to 4k and nothing!

So that's the story and before I catch a load of crap, the last time it started to leak it started small and ended up dumping a lot of coolant after a little while. I live in a apartment and can't do any work on my car there. So I just parked it for the week and then drove it to my brothers garage last night. I didn't want to drive the car before then because I was afraid it would get worse like last time. I would have test drove it and found it earlier but I couldn't take the risk of it getting worse before I got it to my brothers, I had to tow it a month ago to fix the water pump.

In other words i should be fixed im going to work on it again tomorrow and let you know how that goes but I have high hopes that's its good and that I will be able to drift the car this Sunday (going to be 75 here!)

Thanks again for the huge amount of help guys! Like always you have tons of tips and tricks!

We had a discussion the other day about how constant tension clamps are better than worm drive clamps because they don't loosen with heat cycles.
Glad you got it fixed.

In reply to mazdeuce: yes they look much better as well although not available at the local hardware store so I had to use the cheap ones.

It loosing would explain why it didn't leak when I first did the pump.

Stant cooling system pressure tester. This would have saved you time in diagnosing your problem. You don't need it often, but when you do.....

In reply to noddaz:

Yes it would have but I didn't have a chance to work on it all week so I couldn't really diagnose the car I could only see if there was a common issue with the timing cover. But today when I returned the parts I bought I checked to see if you could rent a cooling system tester like that and you can so that will be my first step if I have an issue again.

Don't be to hard on yourself. There are many many instances where someone overthinks the problem and forgets to look at the simple things. See it all the time by people who are paid to fix cars.

(I've never done it though, nope, never, really!)