coolant leak..

[nando]

alright guys I'm pretty sure i have a coolant leak. I thought it was just rain water at first burning off the cat, or maybe oil (I just changed my oil a couple days ago), but it was smoking this morning when I got home and it's not rainy!

anyway, it's definetly coolant, but I'm trying to figure out where it's coming from. I popped open the hood and the smoke was coming from the drivers side of the motor. I'm thinking it's either the heater hoses or that throttle body thing. I didn't see any visual leaks and the coolant level is fine, also the car isn't running hot at all.

I'm going to stick it up on the ramps in a bit and check it out. hopefully it's not the headgasket or something :shock: at least I have all the parts..

as for why it did this suddenly, I'm sure weekend of driving it hard in autox plus me bouncing off the revlimiter @6900rpm probably didn't help. hopefully it'll get me to work one more night. :)

[nando]

on second thought, tranny leak!

the throttle body dealy is leaking a tiny bit (nothing to worry about though), but when I crawled under the car (with it running), I noticed that the fluid all over the place is tranny fluid, not coolant! that's really odd, because it has almost no smell when it burns off, it basically looks and smells like water vapors.

Now to figure out where it's coming from. it looks like it might be one of the tranny cooler lines, because thats where it started being covered in tranny fluid.. it could just be loose or something, or cracked. but the transmission was also making some very odd grinding noises which doesn't make me very comfy. :(

maybe it's time for a 5 speed, but I only have about half the money I'd need for a complete swap..

[nando]

okay, as if anyone cares, but I fixed the problem. the tranny cooler line somehow worked itself loose on the transmission, the 19mm nut was so loose I had to turn it 4 times to get it tight! I also lost about two quarts of tranny fluid which is now all over the bottom of my car and exhaust. :(

that would also explain the strange noises from the tranny.. heh. nothing seems like it was hurt, but I think I should go through the whole car and make sure everything is tight before my next autocross. also, my wheel bearings are starting to sound really bad, I'm going to need to replace those soon too.. *sigh*

oh, btw, I ditched the "Viper" chip for my old bavauto chip.. the Viper had a higher rev limit and maybe more peak power, but the bavauto is smoother through the entire power band and pulls way harder from 3500-5500. The other chip also had a really weird idle, and I don't think it liked the 19# injectors at all, cause it wanted to die when the engine was cold. so, if anyone wants the viper chip, I'll sell it cheap, it's for a 526 ecu (I think it'll work on any 5xx ECU). it's better than stock, but I preffer the bavauto programming.

[65Matt]

Thanks for the update. Keep saving for the manual parts - if your auto tranny was making grinding noises, it's not going to last a long time.