Ok.. My Lexus es300 has 309,783 miles on it.. while traveling at high speed on the freeway my radiator explodes! I pulled over and shut the car off.. Hand on the forehead! dough!

My mechanic diagnosed the cause as "the thermostat stuck." So, he replaced the radiator with a huge hole in the top of it, and of course the thermostat..

Once installed by his worker, "my mechanic was not doing the work", the coolant would not circulate at all. Flushing and filling, and pumping and priming, the coolant just would not cycle through the radiator!

"Blown Head Gasket". The dreaded words which came out of the mechanics mouth... forced a very difficult decision to be made.

At this point, I wanted to do a "compression test" to see whether the head gasket was even worth doing on a car with this many miles...

A call came in, and his secretary told me "5" cylinders were good, and "1" was bad...

I then went down to the shop, and (considering the seriousness of this decision) I requested to "see with my own eyes" the bad cylinder on the compression guage.

Lo and behold the compression was the same!

At that point the Meat Head mechanic who was working on my car was defensive...." I flushed the system "I flushed it"... I know its the head!


Time for a second opinion...


I had overheated it right out of the shop, as they pretty much told me to get that p.o.s. outta here...(they have no clue)...


Several overheats later, I found a mechanic willing to work.. He did a $20.00 "Block Check" which showed NO LEAKS in the block, and NO EXHAUST in the coolant.


He said he had a "stinky suspicion it was the water pump"

He was right!!! Almost all the impeller blades were broken off.. How, I don't know.. But he showed me, and fixed it! And sealed up the valve cover gaskets while he was there.


Be VERY CAUTIOUS with mechanics telling you what it is on these cars!!


IMPORTANT!!!

Before A Head Gasket!! (or a new engine,... or throwing your car away..)

1) Make sure all hoses are in good shape.

2) Make sure No Holes in the over-flow bottle.

3) Make sure your Radiator Cap is good.

4) Make sure your Thermostat is good.

5) Make sure your Water Pump is good.

 

Wow . Thanks for taking the time to write that.

 

Yeah, you have to be careful when selecting a mechanic for these Asian cars... even the last mechanic that got it right, was a little grouchy with me about having to spend 3 + days aligning the timing belt on those tricky cams and that cranky crank....

 

If no coolant is circulating, it should be a dead giveaway that either the thermostat was stuck closed, or the water pump isn't pumping.


Glad you got it fixed!