October 29, 2008 – One Of My Tricks

             I have developed a good trick, a system if you will for cooling down my engine while I am driving.  Catherine’s taxi’s are old and outdated and have an array of problems associated with them.  One is that they overheat regularly.  This is caused by a few things – although it us most often due to a coolant leak somewhere, the fact that Catherine refuses to buy coolant (she just puts water in the radiator), or that the driver hasn’t checked the oil in months.  Truthfully I am guilty of that as well.

            That wasn’t the case today however.  My car has been routinely overheating throughout.  I notice this because the water/trace coolant begins to boil and steam up something nasty on my windshield.  It’s almost like a gurgling sound.  This is the point where I check my temperature gauge.  Often at this point the gauge is teetering on the red (DANGER) zone.  Whenever this lever goes into the red you’re in trouble, and risking blowing your engine.  Often times it will have to be in the red zone for a matter of time, I would suppose at least 15 seconds usually.

            It was quite busy and I didn’t feel like being inconvenienced by the office/shop and swapping out my taxi for another one.  This is quite time consuming.  So whenever I see my car approaching the red zone I either drop the car into neutral and coast for a bit, this works especially well on the bridge where the engine is cooled by the air, or turn it off.  I have many chances to do this, usually at stoplights.  If the engine is really hot I just tell my passengers that I have to make a quick 2-minute stop.  I explain how much of the circus things are with the shop and the cars and the office.  My passengers are always fine with this, and often times sympathetic.