Oorgo

What's that.... smoke?

Here's a little hint for all you automobile drivers, when there's a sound that vaguely resembles a tea-kettle coming from under your hood, pull over.

It was a pretty uneventful weekend, mostly uneventful. I had a gig friday, and another one saturday, yadda yadda, and then Sunday morning(ish) went to visit my sister, parents, nephew, brother-in-law, at my sisters place. Everything was fine, had a nice supper, visited my family, listened to my brother-in-law rant about things a bit, listened to my sister rant about my brother-in-law, the usual.

Dad comes to me saying "you may want to add some coolant to your car when you get home", apparently he had been looking under the hood, as mechanic fathers tend to do. I'm like "yeah, ok, no problem Dad", around 8:30-9 I got in the car to warm it up and I noticed the Low Coolant light was on. Ok, so I went into the house, my brother-in-law said "Oh yeah, I found that was disconnected, so I reconnected it, hmm... I wonder if it's faulty". Ok, yeah, with my car I'll definitely believe that.

We started the 1 1/2 hour trip home, got about 1/2 hour into it and on stopping at a stop sign my wife says "What's that? Is that smoke?" Oh great, I look down, the temperature gauge needle is on red, and there's a sound like a tea-kettle eminating from under the hood. I pull over, turn off the car, leave it so the engine fan is running, swear a blue streak, get ou in the rain, pull off the reservoir cap. Dig around in my car, all I can find is a 500 ml bottle of water, pour that in, it doesn't do shit.

Luckily when I got to my sisters I had plugged in my cell-phone to charge, so I pulled that out, called my Dad. He came by after about 40 minutes, he and my brother-in-law poured 4 litres or more of fluid in, she had been BONE DRY. Of course my bro-in-law swore a fair amount and I'm sure on the way home he ranted to my dad how I should take better care of my car.

Here are a couple things that don't make sense:
1) My car was running fine, not even running warm, before I got there, why did it suddenly overheat?
2) Where did the antifreeze go? There's no visible leak, and the exhaust doesn't smell bad.

While we had been sitting on the side of the road, lights off, blinkers on, dome light on (sporadically), hood up, I think 4 people that drove by stopped, re-enforcing my view of humanity. No one carries anti-freeze though, so I would have been stuck out there all night, in the middle of nowhere, or I would have been paying some towtruck, or signing up for AMA on the fly. Once again I owe my Dad big time for coming out to save my ass. Thanks again Dad.

Posted by Oorgo at August 23, 2004 11:51 AM