As I’ve already posted, I made a 350 mile round trip to collect an electric honey extractor last Thursday. It was a pretty horrible trip of about 110 miles up the M5 with poor visibility and things hadn’t improved much by the time rejoined it to make my way south again.
The journey then went from bad to worse, as the coolant level warning light started flashing about twenty miles from home. Fortunately I was only a mile from Sedgemoor services and managed to pull in there before the engine showed any sign of overheating. As the junction for the A38 at Burnham-on-Sea was only a couple of miles further south, I decided to allow the engine to cool for an hour or so, then refill the coolant system with water and see how far I could make it down the A38. Perhaps if I was lucky and carried some more water I might even make it home. I couldn’t really diagnose the problem any further as it was already dark.
Sadly not. I made about five miles. Fortunately the warning light came back on about a hundred metres before I reached a pub with a car park that I could pull into. Unfortunately they were on the point of closing, so I couldn’t get food and a drink. It was however a convenient place to organise recovery of the car to home.
Initially the suspicion was that something had been kicked up off the road, passed through the grille and punctured the radiator, but after looking in daylight I think it’s more likely that the radiator has just failed and sprung a leak. As far as I’m aware, replacing the radiator requires removing much of the front of the car, so I’ll be leaving it to a garage to deal with.