How to house a homeless friend

PM Sent.

DJ, you're a great guy. Once again I am flat-out blown away at the generosity of the people on this board.

We're working on towing logistics right now.

You're the great guy - we're the support crew

Thanks to DJ, the Jeep was delivered to my house this afternoon.

Tunakid #2 and I went out after dinner and verified the leak location.

And I also purged the heater core of a bunch of remaining red mud resulting from the Dexcool fiasco.

I went to town on it tonight, laying in a muddle of mud, Dexcool and Green stuff and pounding holes in the poor rotted plug. Happily, since it is my house, despite not getting it out tonight, I still can go to bed on time and do more tomorrow.

Got the freeze plug out. It fought hard.

Then while I was flushing the cooling system I touched the hard pipe which is threaded into the water pump and it came out in my hands.

So the thread is borked. Both on the pipe and in the pump.

The pipes npt thread is fixed. It cannot spin on the pipe, so I had to pull the pump.

I tried running a step bit into the pump to take out the first two borked threads but it still won't bite.

Someone tell me how to do an npt / hard pipe setup from Home Depot parts. I hope she has the receipt for this pump.

Belay that. I can buy a new inlet tube.

That XJ looks pretty nice. Tell her that she has good taste in vehicles.

Great job working through the various challenges. I'm pulling (and praying) for your success on this one!

So cool you two, T55 and dj0 !!!

O'Reillys took the water pump for exchange, even though I did not have the receipt, from 2014. I will update tonight with the new water pump, the new freeze plug and the new inlet tube.

You can't make this up. The new water pump is on, the new inlet tube is on, the new freeze plug is in, everything is flushed and clear, I started it briefly, before finding a different freeze plug week. A freeze plug I did three years ago, it's leaking again, rotted from dexcool.

You're kidding, right?

In reply to dj06482:

Nope! I'll take it out tonight. They sell brass ones but they are special order and she needs the car running. I'll just try flushing the junk out of the cooling system really well.

Of note, the water pump impeller had already begun to rust.

That's crazy, sounds like a really thorough flush is in order to try to dilute out the deathcool. One day, many years in the future, you'll look back on all this and laugh at the ridiculousness! Hope the rest goes smoothly!

I wouldn't blame Dexcool for the rust. It makes mud on your cooling system, but won't rot stuff. At some point, it has probably had straight water.

If one core plug is rotten, all the core plugs are rotten. I'd change them all.

Regardless of what anyone else is working on ....this is THE BUILD thread that matters ....

I was under the impression that when Dexcool and Green mixed, they made something fairly corrosive. I cannot verify that, though I will point out that lots of cooling system parts have failed subsequently.

At any rate, I took out three more freeze plugs last night. The one I installed recently may not have been leaking, and it is not rusty on the inside. I'll replace them tonight. There is one which I cannot get to. It's sandwiched between the transmission and engine. That one is a bigger job.

Here are some random pictures for you guys.

The XJ shacked up with Tunatruck while 20 people drop by our house today for the Eclipse

dj06482 wrote: That's crazy, sounds like a really thorough flush is in order to try to dilute out the deathcool. One day, many years in the future, you'll look back on all this and laugh at the ridiculousness! Hope the rest goes smoothly!

I have flushed this silly thing every way, in/out, with water and vinegar, repeatedly.

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/xj-cooling-system/89243/page1/

I did it again, it still had some brown junk in there after all those years.

The last flush I did I used automatic dishwasher detergent and water. It doesn't suds, and it's somewhat slippery so it helps lubricate stuff like the water pump while it's sloshing around in there.

Mrs VCH's '91 Suburban was the subject vehicle. I don't know what the P/O did, but it has a mean case of the brown coolant. 1991 was pre-Deathcool, but I suspect some dumba$$ p/o either 1) put in DC because it was a "GM Coolant", or 2) ran straight water for a loooong time.

Anyway, I got nothing helpful, as usual, other than encouragement.

Three new freeze plugs installed, went for a test drive, looks like it needs some coolant added which I will do in the morning, but everything is holding though the radiator cap might need to be replaced as it was Weeping a bit. I'm on a test drive, 10 PM, and now I'm watching the volt gauge drop. It bottoms out. The GEN light comes on. unbelievable, butthe alternator is dead, I barely made it back to my driveway before she died. Sputtering and spitting the entire length of the driveway. That would have been an embarrassing call to AAA.

Never a dull moment.

In reply to dculberson:

True!

I have many projects for my own junk. For now my time is spent on someone else's.

I wonder - is there an easy way to determine if the alternator is rebuildable?

I dunno, but we have good alternator shop in Converse (east of Spartanburg) that can rebuild pretty much anything.

I'm guessing you want to rebuild it yourself?

In reply to spitfirebill:

Hugh Mull's?