Received from: mit-eddie!wsl.dec.com!kent
|Subject: these cars *are* indestructible
|It's pretty quiet, so I thought I'd send out my latest example of how
|badly Sarah has been hacked by previous owners. Since I brought her
|home, she's run cold... *NO* thermostat!
You didn't say what kind of a car Sarah is, but maybe we can guess that it
is an MBG or some variant, since you mentioned Moss...
Aluminum head or not, there are some cars for which the thermostat is more
important than just letting the block get up to temperature. On some cars,
the thermostat is important for directing water through the block whether
it is open or not. If you take it out (the thermostat, not the block!),
the engine will overheat but you won't know it until something cooks. In
the general scheme of things, this manner of abusing a car is rather milder
than some other techniques, but still, it sounds like you (or he) lucked out.
That could have been a BIG mistake. Isn't it nice when you find a chronic
bug like that, and when you fix it all becomes wonderful?
Jim Muller
|