badvlvo
Bad for Babies
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2006
- Location
- Marina, California
Not necessarily. I had a weird coolant loss on my LT1 Z28. I would never see any signs of a leak when parked, yet, it would lose coolant while driving it. Hooked up to a pressure tester it lost one PSI over a 14 hour period of sitting pressurized. My friend had the bright idea of letting all the pressure off the system and then starting the car with the tester hooked up. About 1 minute after the car started the pressure started to rise until it hit 25 psi when I shut it off. It wasn't even warmed up. That all happened in a minute or two. I turned out that it had a head gasket leak or crack somewhere that was essentially a one way valve. No coolant into the engine where it didn't belong. Combustion gasses were flowing into the cooling system once the engine warmed up enough for the crack/gasket to open up. The cooling system was pressurizing to the point of pushing coolant out of the cap/overflow tank while driving. I'm betting this car has a similar issue. I replaced a customer's head gasket on a 940 Turbo that was doing the same thing. It passed several pressure tests. We finally found the problem because of the white trail down the block where coolant would leak out the side of the head gasket behind the exhaust manifold. The coolant dye is a good idea to sort out if something like this is happening.
Still coolant loss is a symptom of the problem. Regardless of where, it shouldn?t be losing or consuming coolant. If it hasnt been properly pressure tested it should be.