Okay I gotta get this figured out as my wife and I are taking my car 500 miles to Destin FL tomorrow.

I had a small tear/hole in my upper heater hose (right behind the upper radiator hose on the head), so I replaced that last weekend.

Then I noticed it was leaking slightly from the upper radiator hose. That hose was very old so I just replaced that one tonight.

So I re-filled the cooling system, and let the car warm up. As it's warming up with the radiator cap off, the coolant starts rising above the radiator neck (instead of going into the overflow bottle). I don't understand why it does this. It's done it before, although not the last couple of times I have re-filled the system.

So anyway, I have to let about a cup of coolant out through the bleed screw to keep it from overflowing everywhere.

Meanwhile, it appears that there is STILL coolant leaking from somewhere. I check with my mirror the underside of both the radiator hose and the heater hose, no leaks there. I can see that the front of the transmission is wet, but I can't figure out where it's coming from.

So I wipe it up, say F it, and drive down to fill up the gas tank. Get back home, look, the front of the transmission is COMPLETELY DRY. So I drive around the neighborhood some more, come back, still dry.

So I don't know if I still have a leak or not. I guess I'll check in the morning to see if the coolant level is low or not. I may also run it up to my mechanic-friend's shop and let him take a look.

I just dunno if I should drive it 500 miles or not. We could take my wife's Corolla, but it has no cruise control and doesn't get as good gas mileage as my car does.

My car has 267K miles on it, but the engine itself has always seem to run perfectly, still capable of 35+ MPG highway (36 city if I hypermile it ).

 

anyone?

 

Radiator tank to core joint on the top tank. Will only leak when full hot and system is fully pressurized. Get yourself cooling system pressure tester and go to town.

 

agreed get a pressure tester...or you can put the cap on and let it run till it warms up, but it doesn't look like that is doing anything for ya

 

still had air in the system, which is why it was trying to overflow. Still not sure where the coolant on the tranny was coming from.

Just drove the car over 1000 miles over the weekend without a single problem. It did not even appear to lose any coolant from the overflow bottle.