I saw these photos a few days ago and I knew as soon as they were published online I just had to link across to them. The photographer in question is Chris Willson from the website travel67.com, who’s cracking behind the camera and takes shots I could only dream of snapping. On his latest trip [...]
When I last left you I had arrived at my tuning shop with my car engine being held together by some red RTV, and me a nervous wreck after making the longest 20-minute drive ever from my house to the garage. The guy stopped working on a car that was infinitely more powerful than mine could ever hope to be, and took a look.
Now the non-car people might not know this, but when engine heads are made/cast they will have some holes in them that were made in the moulding process. These holes are about 2-3cm in diameter usually, and are then capped off with something called “freeze plugs” which are basically a disc of thing metal which just presses into the hole and blocks it off. There are usually a few of these around the engine in various places. This I did not know, and was soon to be left feeling very stupid about.
“It’s just a cracked freeze plug” the guy said, telling me I had nothing at all to worry about! It had cracked possibly because it was weakened when my car temperature went up during the drive home from installing my turbo after the fan wiring mishap. I just needed to buy a new plug from Suzuki, knock the other one out with a screwdriver and a hammer, and then press this one in, in its place. So off I drove to Suzuki, and it turned out this repair that at one point was looking like it might cost me over Y100,000 cost me Y110. Just a small difference! But I felt so lucky I’d missed out on a couple of auctions for engines when all I needed was a 2cm disc of metal to fix it. In 2 days my freeze plug was here and I hammered it into place, with a fair bit of RTV around the edge to make sure it sealed, and that was that! I was on the road and fully mobile again!
Had a couple of little issues since, but they have mostly been ironed out. One pipe was leaking a little coolant. Some RTV fixed it for a while, but I managed to pull the right pipe off an Alto that was in the junkyard to replace it so fingers crossed that’s sorted now. A radiator cap leak was also causing some of the coolant in my expansion tank to be leaking out, but a replacement cap has fixed that too.
The next issue to come up… well who knows! But I’m sure it won’t be long until it does. Until then I’ll just have to get myself ready for whatever it is going to throw at me.
Tags: alto works, car problems, coolant, F6A, featured, overheating, suzuki
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