Plutonic
02-07-2011, 11:40 PM
My Magna has driven nearly perfectly since I got it three months ago. I drove up to Adelaide for my brother's wedding and when we were there I noticed it heating up a lot, then we parked and a lot of steam was coming from the bonnet, it was incredibly hot (lucky this happened an hour after we arrived, not during the six hour drive).
We got the car back to where we were staying and went to bed, there was no point trying to fix it at 10pm with no supplies. In the morning I had a look under the bonnet and noticed the tube from the water pump to the intake manifold had snapped, I took it off and it was completely ruined, then I noticed the belt driving the water pump had also snapped. I walked down to Repco, replace the two ($50 total) and got a bottle of coolant.
After putting everything back together I went for a drive to see if it was still heating up, it didn't seem to be but every time I put power behind the acceleration it would just drain and the revs would drop. I got home to find a large piece of metal (something to do with the LPG system) completely frozen. The warm coolant wasn't being pumped through the area to keep it from freezing. I started the car and let it idle then noticed a small leak from the water pump. I got a lift to Sprint Auto to get a replacement water pump ($70, it would have been $90 at Repco) and another bottle of coolant, at this point overdrawing my account as I'd only had $100 backup money in case something went wrong.
After replacing the water pump the car ran fine, we drove back to Mt Gambier (six hours late, missing my shift at work) but the car is now running perfectly.
So after all that crap, all the wasted time, all the money spent, all the things that went wrong. Can anyone guess what the original cause of the problem would have been? I doubt it was all a coincidence that three things broke at once.
We got the car back to where we were staying and went to bed, there was no point trying to fix it at 10pm with no supplies. In the morning I had a look under the bonnet and noticed the tube from the water pump to the intake manifold had snapped, I took it off and it was completely ruined, then I noticed the belt driving the water pump had also snapped. I walked down to Repco, replace the two ($50 total) and got a bottle of coolant.
After putting everything back together I went for a drive to see if it was still heating up, it didn't seem to be but every time I put power behind the acceleration it would just drain and the revs would drop. I got home to find a large piece of metal (something to do with the LPG system) completely frozen. The warm coolant wasn't being pumped through the area to keep it from freezing. I started the car and let it idle then noticed a small leak from the water pump. I got a lift to Sprint Auto to get a replacement water pump ($70, it would have been $90 at Repco) and another bottle of coolant, at this point overdrawing my account as I'd only had $100 backup money in case something went wrong.
After replacing the water pump the car ran fine, we drove back to Mt Gambier (six hours late, missing my shift at work) but the car is now running perfectly.
So after all that crap, all the wasted time, all the money spent, all the things that went wrong. Can anyone guess what the original cause of the problem would have been? I doubt it was all a coincidence that three things broke at once.