jonathan909

Thanks. Looking at the fit table on that first one, it appears that anything with a 2.5 that's '02 or later is a good bet. The earlier ones are mostly 2.2 .

Can someone save me the research, please? It would be very helpful to know when (200x) this changed from the a-few-flags to the many-teeth version. Reason I ask is that I'm helping out a pal with an '07 GT that's really busting his chops, we just discovered a missing tooth (don't bother asking why - it's complicated) and knowing which years to scout the junkyard for would save us time+hassle.

We already had that conversation, but noted again.

This may be turning out to be less mysterious than I thought. It's beginning to look like the two overheatings from the two bad rad hoses precipitated an HG leak that is now causing coolant loss and in turn the new overheating (insert frowny face here).

Honestly, the best advice I can offer - especially for a brother who needs to jam econo - is to find a good local indy tire shop and buy a good used matched set from them. Then stick with them. The guy we go with here in Calgary, I think we've been dealing with him for 30 years. Every ten years or so he moves his shop to try to get away from us, but we keep tracking him down. He's almost always able to take care of us; we've only had to look elsewhere (the local buy+sell - kijiji) for the old '95 Legacy wagon with the small wheels because those sizes are getting rare. Then we still take them to him for mounting+balancing.

There's wax in there?

A valid suggestion too. Mine was based on the assumption that, while the remote entry transmitter is active (that is, it needs a battery to work), the key transponder is passive, like an RFID tag. And while programming the car for the former (pairing) is usually a user operation, I would guess that programming the car for a transponder would have to be done by the dealer.

To reiterate: I don't know anything about transponder keys or if this car uses them. My comments are based on the assumption that it does. My guess is that you're confusing the key's transponder with the key's keyless entry transmitter. They are not the same thing. Just for yuks, take the battery out of the key that works. It won't (un)lock the doors, but does it still start the car?

I don't have anything this new, so I don't know whether this is a key transponder thing or similar. But what you're saying is confusing. You're saying you have three keys, two of them make the motor go vroom, and the third doesn't? So this is a key problem and not a car problem i.e. the car hasn't been programmed for the transponder in the nonworking key?

Thermostat: I'm not talking about opening temp, because by the time it's that hot it's either already fully-open or clamped shut (i.e. defective). I'm considering the possibility that there's an aftermarket cheapie in there that doesn't open as wide and support as high a flow rate as OEM. Gotta consider it.

Interesting. Aside from it sticking out kinda far, my gut reaction is that it would be a perfect product for PILE (Premature Inadvertent Lubricant Egress). But they claim to make them for a lot of engines, big and small, and if they were a disaster-in-waiting I expect they would have been run off the market by now.

Obviously I considered simple cloggage as well - a new rad was what solved the overheating problem I had with that old Dakota. But I haven't used any of the rad flush concoctions for a long time, so maybe I'll give that a go after I check the thermostat. If anyone's had good luck with any in particular, I'd appreciate the recommendations. That rad looks slick, and I"ll bet it works a treat. But more than $550 (Canadian, landed) for a rad? I paid less than that for the car.

AFK for a while, but back and with more related questions. Regarding the hose, I was lucky to have a second '01 H6 here (a cheapie waiting for a head gasket, as previously discussed), so I was able to loot a couple of hoses from it to keep my DD running, and I picked up the replacement lower from the dealer today. Rather more expensive than aftermarket, but in general I jam econo, so on the rare occasion I have to shell out a few extra bucks it doesn't hurt too much. But... The weather has been unusually hot here over the last month or so (as with a lot of places - it was hard to believe that a town in the BC interior set a record higher than that ever recorded in Vegas, and then was promptly destroyed by fire), and this car has been running a little hotter than it should. First I had to deal with the two sequential blown hoses out on the highway, after which I was nervous about potential damage to the bearings, but it seems to have gotten through it okay and settled down. But it's hot again this week, and on the way home an hour ago it was clearly struggling to keep cool - any extra load, whether it be a hill, going a little faster, or running the AC, was the difference between "somewhat hotter than normal" and "pushing toward the red". So I could use some suggestions. AfaIk, this is the original rad, but I haven't looked closely. I'll mos def drop the thermostat and make sure it doesn't have some low-flow aftermarket in there. Also, I recall from unrelated discussions years ago (regarding my old 318 Dodge Dakota pickup, I think) someone bringing up surfactants (added to the coolant) to improve the thermal transfer between the coolant and the metal. Is that real or bogus? Anything else I'm missing?

I think you jumped to a possibly-unwarranted conclusion there. I didn't read it as either sarcasm or arrogance. Could just as easily have been a sincere thank-you he felt he neglected in his first post. So I'd suggest lightening up a bit and giving a new member the benefit of the doubt.

I saw that they were all cut-to-fit, but the Gates didn't even look like that would work.

Normally parts are pretty easy to find, but here's a weird one - the lower rad hose for the '01 3.0 H6. I blew two rad hoses (the long upper and the lower) over the span of a couple of weeks. Grabbed the upper from the wrecker, but they ruin all the lowers when they drain the incoming cars. But every aftermarket lower (Gates, AC Delco, etc.) I've seen so far is completely wrong, and I wound up ordering one from the dealer. Did I miss something?

Not my own problem; a good friend is in the middle of overhauling an EJ20 (of provenance unknown) and is having a little trouble sourcing rings. I haven't confirmed any of this, but he says his pistons use 1.2mm rings top and middle, and the oil ring is 2.0mm - but that all the kits from Rock (for turbos) are 1.2/1.2/2.5 . Where is he likely to find the set he needs?

Ooooo! Pretty light show!

Any silicone dielectric goo (that's a term of art) will do, and use it liberally at both ends of the wire after cleaning everthing up - once the arc starts, it creates carbon tracks that it likes to continue to follow, especially on the surface of the (ceramic) plug insulator. If it still acts flaky and the fault sticks with the cylinder, you may have a hairline crack in the insulator, so you're just going to have to replace the plug.

Hell, I'm surprised that Canada and Oz aren't aligned on this.

Well, it's complicated... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HC-12a It's not just about ozone anymore - we pretty much solved that problem, so now it's about greenhouse gasses. But it's also about safety, which is why R12a is illegal in the US. There are exceptions to all these rules, of course, but they have to do with industrial users vs. consumers and whether you have to get a license to buy it and crap like that.

But the gauges are part of the package (i.e. "manifold gauge"), so we've got 'em and might as well understand how to use 'em, right? And as with most things up here, usually different (e.g. R12a vs. R134a) and/or worse (e.g. more expensive and sometimes just a lot harder to get). Rarely better.

Interesting. Counterintuitive. Would have been good to know before buying the keg, of course, but there was/is still a strong cost-effectiveness argument for having done so (assuming we can figure out how to use it). I have a digital shipping scale, so that might end up being useful. Until I can work out the weight approach (one part of which is going to be resolving the behavioural differences between R134a and R12a), I'm looking at temperature/pressure tables to get a handle on the behaviour of a correctly-charged system. It would seem to make sense, then, to just add refrigerant until the system kinda falls into line with the tables.

Here's the story to date: It's the '01 H6 OBW I've been working on over the past year. Everything's been going pretty well, so (since it just got hotter than hell here) it's time to move on to the AC, which hasn't worked since I got it. Thinking it's stupid and wasteful to use a can of refrigerant+dye to find a leak I know is there (I pulled a vacuum and it went away pretty quickly), I made up an adapter from my shop air to the manifold gauge. (Please skip the lecture about moisture in the system - I understand, one thing at a time, let's move on.) Took a minute to find bad O-rings on both sides of the compressor. With them replaced, the system holds a vacuum just fine. Now comes the tricky part: Every instructional youtube vid claims "here's how the pros do it!" when we all know the pros don't use little retail cans of refrigerant. I got a big tank so my pals and I can do this at a fraction of the cost. The downside is that this makes it a lot harder to add the specified amount of refrigerant by weight. Also, being in Greater Upper Soviet Canuckistan, we don't have R134a up here - it's illegal. We have R12a. It's compatible with R134a systems, but if you mix the refrigerants you seize the compressor in a heartbeat. So I added "some" refrigerant to the (evacuated) system today, and it's running detectably cool, but not cold. So what am I doing wrong, besides not knowing how much I've got in there? Should I be feeding in liquid or vapour (the tank has a valve for each)? How can I get the charge right without relying on a scale? Presumably I should be able to suss this from the gauges. Someone please set me straight.

Fwiw, the two things (in addition to cats, of course, and the exhaust pipes they trash when cutting out the cats) that I can never get (at least from the self-serve yards) around here are gas tanks and drive shafts. They destroy the gas tanks by punching holes to drain leftover gas, then the driveshafts - unless well recessed - get it from their forklifts. The full-service wreckers tend to be a little more circumspect. A driveline shop can also take care of balancing the shaft itself.