Moving past denial: coolant seal failure

[afterburn27]

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...

[proz07]

hmmm unfortunate but i had close to the same issue with my rebuild once it was started the first time but but it would overflow the coolant after a say 10mile drive once i parked it a couple min later. it was doing everything of a coolant seal failure or pinch except lots of white smoke in the exhaust. so i decided to do the one last test and test the block with a pinnapple racing style coolant seal presure checker. the one i made is in my build thread but you can also see it on pinnapples site.
http://www.pineappleracing.com/index...ROD&ProdID=142
well turned out my drain plug was just loose enough to allow air into the system on shutdown then once restarted the coolant would have air in the system making it overflow.

could try that before you pull or split the keg.

z

[afterburn27]

Originally Posted by proz07

hmmm unfortunate but i had close to the same issue with my rebuild once it was started the first time but but it would overflow the coolant after a say 10mile drive once i parked it a couple min later. it was doing everything of a coolant seal failure or pinch except lots of white smoke in the exhaust. so i decided to do the one last test and test the block with a pinnapple racing style coolant seal presure checker. the one i made is in my build thread but you can also see it on pinnapples site.
http://www.pineappleracing.com/index...ROD&ProdID=142
well turned out my drain plug was just loose enough to allow air into the system on shutdown then once restarted the coolant would have air in the system making it overflow.

could try that before you pull or split the keg.

z

Yeah I am going to pressure test the coolant system once more before I rip everything apart, but unfortunately I think the coolant blowing out of the rear housing is a dead giveaway.

That is a pretty nifty tool on pineapple racing's site, I may have to buy that for future testing.

[Signal 2]

Sorry to hear this. Anybody whose done they're own rebuild can sympathize.
I'll tell ya, if it were me, it would probably be a good thing to be busy at work. That would force me to just walk away from it for a while and sort of "re-charge". Otherwise I'd just hurry the job and increase chances of screwing something else up.
Anyway, good luck from here out, keep us posted.

[afterburn27]

Originally Posted by Signal 2

Sorry to hear this. Anybody whose done they're own rebuild can sympathize.
I'll tell ya, if it were me, it would probably be a good thing to be busy at work. That would force me to just walk away from it for a while and sort of "re-charge". Otherwise I'd just hurry the job and increase chances of screwing something else up.
Anyway, good luck from here out, keep us posted.

Well, I didn't rebuild the engine, lol. I had someone else build it for me because I thought it would save me a lot of time.

I won't say who built the engine because I still think they build quality engines. This was probably just a fluke... And I did have a warranty on the build, but it has expired because I took so long to put everything together. That is my own fault and I'm not expecting anything from the builder.

I might do the rebuild this time around because I enjoy it and I seem to have horrible luck when I contract out jobs on the FD. 90% of the time I end up re-doing it myself.

[vex]

Originally Posted by afterburn27

Well, I didn't rebuild the engine, lol. I had someone else build it for me because I thought it would save me a lot of time.

I won't say who built the engine because I still think they build quality engines. This was probably just a fluke... And I did have a warranty on the build, but it has expired because I took so long to put everything together. That is my own fault and I'm not expecting anything from the builder.

I might do the rebuild this time around because I enjoy it and I seem to have horrible luck when I contract out jobs on the FD. 90% of the time I end up re-doing it myself.

That sucks bro. Hit up the Builder, they may be willing to re-build the engine since you haven't logged many miles on the car. If not, no worries. I'll help you after I get mine back in .

[Brent]

I feel your pain. I seem to of had a string of bad luck having other people work on my FD because I was too busy. It ended up being an expensive lesson learned before I deployed. It also cost me alot of time redoing everything. Now I only trust a few people to work on my cars when I'm too busy(people like Dan Chadwick and David Jerome... both do great work on the FD's). I really enjoy working on FD's, but I have discovered I like driving on the track more... and I'll gladly pay someone so I have that opportunity It's going to be a good summer.

[RotaryRoadRage]

man , you need to pm me or call me and i will come help.. i'm mean it's not like you're far from me .. lol

chris

[afterburn27]

Confirmed today with a pressure test.

I put together my own pressure tester with my 4" industrial pressure gauge (accurate to +/- 0.15 psi). Here's the results:

0 min - 15.9 psi
5 min - 15.1 psi
10 min - 14.7 psi
15 min - 14.3 psi
20 min - 14.0 psi
25 min - 13.7 psi

So it's not a gusher, but plenty to cause problems. I didn't catch it the first time I pressure tested because the tester I borrowed had a crappy small gauge and you couldn't really tell the difference between 14 and 15 psi.

I pulled the plugs and cranked the engine after I released the pressure and once again coolant misted out of the rear housing.

I guess this explains all the coolant issues I've had from the first start.

[vex]

I'm going to ask you for those plans or at least a pic or two. Post it on CCVT for me (and others)

[afterburn27]

Originally Posted by vex

I'm going to ask you for those plans or at least a pic or two. Post it on CCVT for me (and others)

I'll show you later, it is pretty simple.



The builder actually contacted me after finding this thread and offered to make things right, even though the engine is technically out of warranty. You can't beat that customer service with a stick!

I'm interested to see what actually went wrong when the engine is disassembled. The internal coolant leak has definitely gotten worse over the ~50 mile life of this engine. And I am meticulous when it comes to burping the coolant system and watching temps (especially on a new setup). The only time I noticed anything unusual on the temp gauge was on the last start when the coolant temps failed to rise normally. PFC commander is my primary source and I have a temp probe installed in the throttle-body coolant circuit (now bypassing the TB).

[Signal 2]

Originally Posted by afterburn27

...The builder actually contacted me after finding this thread and offered to make things right, even though the engine is technically out of warranty. You can't beat that customer service with a stick!

Unless the builder prefers it otherwise, maybe let everyone know who stepped up. Lord knows forums can hurt shops, we should be so quick to laud them too.

[RotaryRoadRage]

yea.. you can't beat that..he reached out to you.. that's the best thing out since sliced loaf bread lol.