uuugggghhhh...
So I'm finally coming to accept that my new engine has a pinched or improperly installed coolant seal.
Everything seemed good on the first start. The engine fired up immediately on the first crank and ran great. I used the lisle coolant funnel to burp the system for the first couple starts. I noticed a slight coolant smell in the exhaust, but didn't think much of it because I had spilled some coolant in the engine bay. I also noticed that the air bubbles never completely stopped inside the coolant funnel, but I know it takes a long time to burp the coolant system on an FD, so once again I figured it wasn't a big deal.
The engine only has about 5 trips on it, and every time I parked back in the garage the coolant was a bit low. Now I'm getting suspicious, but figure that there was still a small amount of air in the system so I topped it off at the filler neck. Temps were perfect at all times, never overheated.
Last week I went out to fire up the engine and everything started normally, but once the water temps hit ~65 C they started dropping rapidly and I stepped outside only to notice coolant pissing out of the overflow tank.
I killed the engine, cleaned up the mess and borrowed a pressure tester to see if the coolant system would hold pressure. After pumping it up I noticed one very small leak that produced a couple drips every minute. Now I convinced myself that after shutting the car down each time the system wasn't holding a vacuum and t was not being returned to the engine from the overflow tank.
Well that turned out to be one more excuse...
Today I tried to fire up the car and it barely sputtered before dying. No biggie I thought, we have all flooded a rotary engine before... especially after shutting down before reaching operating temps. I ran through the standard operating procedure (pull plugs, remove EGI fuse, crank, etc.) and when I looked under the car there was a small puddle of f*#king coolant under the rear housing. I guess I can't come up with any more excuses now...
The plug holes on the rear housing were obviously wet. Not good.
Well I cleaned it up and fired the engine up for shits and giggles. As usual there was a little smoke and faint coolant smell, but this time the coolant system was INSTANTLY pressurized once the engine fired over and bubbles were streaming out of the funnel. And something else weird happened: the temps never started rising on either the PFC or my gauge. I shut it down as soon as I noticed my temps weren't rising.
So I think I'm done. No more excuses. The engine is coming out now.
Sorry for the long poorly written post, I had to vent somewhere. lol
The sad part is that it has taken me about a year to get to this point because I have been super busy recently. I only get to work in the garage on a spare hour or two on the weekends. Here goes another year...
