My radiator leak has been persisting. I'd first noticed a leak back in August. at that time i pulled the radiator off and tried to investigate. Having done similar work on an old heater matrix with solder, I had a go at fixing it. But - on refitting - the slow leak remained..... Peering past the fan behind the radiator shows it pooling at the base....
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| Radiator leak |
.....and so I took it off the car again. My friend Peter had offered me an alternative radiator. He'd had it re-cored (with three cores) but hadn't used it. It's off a later DS, so the small M5 sized threads for bolts for the bracing bar and fabric hood are different to those on my car, but that's a minor point. A few weeks ago I visited Peter and collected the radiator from him.
With a back-up radiator now in-hand I had my weeping radiator pressure tested - with a view to maybe getting it fixed properly. But it came back as 'no leak found'. You might think I'd have been happy with that - but I was sure that there was a leak. At home I tried to carry out some more testing of my own. Blocking off the top and bottom inlets/ outlets with offcuts of thick polythene sheet and jubilee clips, I filled the radiator, blocked the overflow with my finger and blew furiously into the filler cap hole. It appeared only very slowly but - as suspected - I began to see the outcomes of a tiny weep from somewhere within the dark recesses of the radiator. Wherever it was, it was VERY small at the moment.
Based on where the water was appearing, the leak seemed to be from where one of the zig-zag vanes was soldered to one of the outer tubes and - if so - it seemed fairly accessible. I decided to have a go at repairing it again.
It wasn't accessible. I tried to apply some solder. I heated the area and the 'vane' metal was so thin that it turned to ash... Also, the core tube was so thin that the small hole became a bigger hole - meaning a repair was now impossible...... Never mind. it was just one core on the outer edge of the radiator. I could just plug that core with solder and ignore it.
I added heat and tried to solder again. It got worse. I think I was kidding myself as the work area was inaccessible and becoming quite dirty by now - with little chance of getting solder to stick. Instead, the heat had caused a hole in the core next door.... and there was a growing absence of 'vane'.....I tried a third and last time. By the time I had finished, several cores, several rows deep, had sections missing.
I had to finally concede that I'd well-and-truly killed the radiator. I mean REALLY killed it. I'm very pleased to say that there is no photographic evidence of this but trust me - it wasn't a pretty sight by the time I'd finished. It looked like the radiator had been hit by a small meteor.....
I've got the option of fitting Peter's radiator of course, but I'm going to leave that for the moment as, with the radiator off, it's an ideal time to investigate that HP pump leak.
