Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Carp

The car I drive now is two years younger than my old car. It's the exact same make and model and behaving in exactly the same way as my last car before it blew a head gasket. Of course I'd like to prevent my current car from doing the same thing. My car runs (or says it runs) abnormally hot. We've replaced the thermostat (the gauge used to read WAAAAY cold and never moved) and flushed the system with new coolant. I had it checked out today again, and the mechanic says it's fine. He shot the temperature gun at various and sundry places over the radiator and the car is running right where it's supposed to. So that's good, we don't have to spend money. However, the gauge shows it running all the way up in the "A" of the "NORMAL" region. On hot days it can easily venture into the "L" area which concerns me because right after that is the RED zone indicating the car is likely to overheat. Usually turning on the AC or the heater will bring the gauge down some (both switch on another fan) although the heater doesn't bring the indicator much farther down than the AC. All I want to know is when I should really be concerned about my car overheating. If the gauge is just off, I wish it would be off on the other direction so I wouldn't have to needlessly roast myself in traffic during a hot summer day. If my car is actually going to progress towards blowing a head gasket, then I want to do something to stop that. BMW's don't have these problems... right? =)

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