Dave, on Stop Leak:
> I used a similar product on my first car (many years ago), a 76 Honda Civic.
> I was getting white smoke from the tail pipe, and the car was already over
> 10 years old and has rusted through floors. I put in a bottle of radiator
> stop leak and it stop the coolant from getting into the combustion
>chamber.
> That lasted for about 2 years till the timming belt broke. My little Civic
> was a great little car, I still miss it :(.
Just the other day I was wondering: "It once seemed like every other car
was a Civic, and now you hardly see them at all. Wonder where they
all went?" They _were_ nice little cars.
I used a bottle of Stop Leak on my '72 Spit once. Now that the gasps
from the gallery have subsided, I'll explain - I was in the middle
of nowhere headed north up through the rolling hills of the
central NC/VA borderlands when I got a wiff of the unmistakable
smell of hot coolant. Sure enough, when I checked there was a small
hairline crack where the top pipe joins the radiator. I limped
into a rural gas/bait/ammo store and the owner handed me a small
bottle of copper-colored liquid with a lable that proclaimed it
would "stop any leak in any car!"
Now, I wondered if this would ruin anything, or - worse yet - plug
up the heater element, something which had happened when I used
a sealer on another car. I pondered my choices, which didn't
seem very promising on a Friday night in rural Virginia. That,
plus the fact that I was on the way to a hot date with a woman
who was teaching for a year in an underserved community, made
me dump the contents of the bottle in the radiator.
Lo and behold, it worked. And it didn't plug up the heater
radiator, either. It kept the crack closed for the remainder
of the weekend and all the next week as well (the Spit was
my only transportation at the time) until I had time to
flush the system and take the radiator to a shop for a proper
soldering job.
I've kept a bottle in my emergency kit ever since.
Ken Strayhorn
Hillsborough NC
|