Story time:

Two weeks ago on my casual drive home from work I started to smell the sweet scent of burning coolant. I instantly started to panic and stare at my temp gauge to watch for the slightest movement as I pulled off the freeway.

I pop open the hood and see coolant sprayed all over my engine bay, but I still had some coolant left in the reservoir (well below low limit). After inspecting all hoses including overflow hose, I was not able to find the source. Luckily, I had a bottle of distilled water in my trunk from my last coolant flush so I topped her off and turned her back on to look for the leak. After 10 minutes of inspecting my entire engine bay while the car was running I was extremely confused as to what had happened as nothing was leaking and my coolant level remained the same after topping it off. I slowly make my way back home while watching my temp and keeping my nose open to make sure the scent doesn't come back.

After letting everything cool down a bit I clean the coolant off of everything and continue my inspection. From all the blood splatter knowledge I gained from watching Dexter, I analyzed the coolant splatter and determined it had to be coming from that damned plastic nipple on top of the radiator that everyone breaks. After turning the car back on and closely watching that area, I start to see bubbles coming out of the neck of the upper hose connector!



Now that I've replaced the radiator with an aluminum Koyo rad and all of the hoses with RB silicone hoses, the engineer in me still wants to figure out why it cracked in that location and not one of the weaker spots i.e. damned plastic nipple. The only thing I can think of other than it's time was up is one/all of my motor mounts have failed causing the upper radiator hose to pull on the radiator when the engine shakes.

If anyone else has any ideas as to why this would happen I'd like to hear them!

Some info: 72k miles on original radiator. Car has seen the track twice. Both times I used only water/water wetter. System was flushed before winter and replaced with 70water/30coolant.

Thanks for reading! If you didn't...

TLDR version: radiator crack weird location why?

 

Plastic + time + heat = breakage.

 

Yeah I figured it was just it's time to go. I've never seen it crack in a location like that though (I guess it's bound to crack anywhere since the entire top is plastic). I've only seen splits at the seams caused by normal wear.

 

Yeah, radiators with plastic end tanks will fail from time and all the heat cycling. Any radiator that has the plastic section starting to turn more obviously green vs the deeper brown/green of normal, is in imminent danger of cracking/breaking/splitting, though they can fail far earlier. Probably the suspension softness, road quality, what temp extremes the radiator sees, etc... all have an impact on this.

 

I'm just extremely lucky it didn't overheat.

 

8's radiator is gonna crack sooner or later. Happened to all of us.
Mine just cracked few month ago, took me a hell of 6 hours to swap out the radiator and hoses. lol

Good luck.

 

Haha yeah I put everything back together this last weekend. Swapping the radiator wasn't too difficult but I couldn't get the 2 silicone upper radiator hoses on the split for the life of me! I had to call it a day after spending 2 hours and lots of skin/blood trying everything from soapy water, coolant, and wd40 to get those damn hoses on the split. Of course the next morning I get them on with ease.