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Feeling the pressure
NOT long before Christmas I had to drive down to Reading to collect an engine and gearbox. I hitched up the car transporter trailer to my old Discovery and had a pretty uneventful run down and back, apart from a half-hour delay on the M4 after a couple of modern cars collided with each other and covered all four lanes with bits of splintered plastic. The old beast has been running well since I changed the head gasket about a year ago: there is a slow oil leak from the transfer ’box (“they all do that, sir”) and I really need to sort out the rot in the inner wings and bulkhead, if only to stop the carpets getting soaked every time it rains. But I can leave it sitting for weeks, get in and turn the key, it starts first time and everything works.
Having unloaded the trailer I thought I would check the oil and coolant levels to save me having to do it before the next trip. I found that there was a fair bit of pressure in the cooling system, and even more worryingly the coolant had that burnt smell that usually indicates trouble. You can buy a sniffer which detects the presence of combustion gases in the coolant header tank but I didn’t need a diagnostic tool to tell me something was amiss.
I had a fair amount of work to do before the holidays, including a local vehicle collection, so I crossed my fingers and hoped the Discovery would hold together a while longer. On the next journey it was building up enough pressure in the cooling system to start spitting coolant
