Remember the RX8 that I have that doesn’t move in the winter? Well, it totally makes up for all of that in the summer months, until I break it. Well, I didn’t really break it, it broke itself first, then…oh fine, I will just start at the beginning.
Last Monday, I was sitting in a parking lot with some icy cold A/C pumping full blast on my face. It was rather nice considering there was 1 million percent humidity hugging the outside of the vehicle. I then begin smelling the succulent smell of antifreeze. “Oh Noes!” I exclaimed. (So what, I’m dramatic, don’t judge.) I hopped out of the race car into the sweltering heat, and found antifreeze fire hose’ing itself out of a crack in the coolant overflow bottle. Terrific, I thought, this is just what I was hoping to fix after my truck’s recent shenanigans. So there I sat, helpless, because honestly there isn’t much that you can do when this happens except for catching what you can with rags and hoping it stops before the engine is totally empty.
That night I hopped on the internet and searched around for a new coolant overflow bottle. Much to my chagrin, my only option was to buy the exact same crappy, crack-prone overflow bottle from the dealer that had failed me in just 50K easy miles. Great. Not only was I now planning for failure in the future, but I also got to pay top dollar for it. Reluctantly, out came the wallet.
On the following Saturday morning I had the bottle in my hands, and I had just gotten up early so that my wife and I could use her car again. I popped the hood and began removing the items that were surrounding the old overflow bottle. I removed the two 10mm nuts on the top and gently pulled on it so that I could get a look at where my pliers needed to sneak into (one hose clamp is buried deep). SNAP! is what I got in return. My heart then entered my stomachular regions and I had sealed my fate for the next 24 hours minimum. That’s right, I had just snapped the plastic tube off the top of the plastic end-tanked radiator.
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