Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:26:24 -0800
Reply-To: Scott Daniel - Turbovans <scottdaniel@TURBOVANS.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Scott Daniel - Turbovans <scottdaniel@TURBOVANS.COM>
Subject: Re: Sealant necessary for coolant hoses?
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funniest thing .
in near half a century of driving I have never had a hose blow in a blizzard
..
or even when driving in a serious rain storm.
my cars all seem to know when to behave.
regarding cooling system failures ...
it's always about if you catch it or not ..
As long as you notice that something is not right, and notice it early in
the incident..
with some smarts, engine damage isn't that likely.
there's this other factor too...
the more parts you replace proactively ..the more likely it is that one you
didn't think of will go south on you somewhere else in the van.
but for sure ...the cooling system is 'the one' most likely to give problems
that can be serious.
Definitely need to take good care of it and watch things closely.
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Beierl" <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 11:12 AM
Subject: Re: Sealant necessary for coolant hoses?
> At 01:23 PM 2/24/2011, mcneely4@cox.net wrote:
>>Not inexpensive, but what is money not spent worth when one is 60 or
>>100 miles out, in a driving rain, at night, and a hose blows? I
>>realize that other failures can occur, but this one seems like a no
>>brainer to me, given the age of the hoses, the lack of knowledge
>>most of us have about past maintenance on the vehicle, and the
>>relative simplicity of doing the work. Of course, if you only drive
>>the thing around town, and are comfortable with killing the engine
>>by loss of coolant, then running old hoses might be a risk you want to
>>take.
>
> It ain't always that easy, and not always a matter of comfort. You
> said a while back that you had the means to buy a big RV if you
> wanted to, so for you this is a matter of prudent allocation of
> surplus money. But supposing for the sake of argument that you were
> getting a Social Security disability check for $1529 a month and drug
> expenses around $150 monthly at $8/scrip from the VA; and were
> keeping up your end of a $1000 mortgage plus heat etc. on a house you
> jointly own with your former wife, and working on a five-year plan
> with her to pay off $25k in debt that you'd foolishly acquired during
> the marriage. At that point choices about expensive parts for your
> Vanagon get a bit closer to the bone...
>
> Which is not to say that having had fair warning, so to say, I didn't
> get a full set of replacement hoses from Ken, barring the one that
> costs a million bucks and is NLA; and I'm half proud and half ashamed
> to say that 18 months later well over half of them are installed,
> along with the Go Westy pipe-end band-aids. What's left is largely
> the tricky little devils around the oil cooler. But the money for
> those hoses came from emergency money not intended for that sort of
> thing. So...can I afford to keep a Vanagon? Realistically, probably
> not. Except for one thing...in the worst case, if everything goes
> pear-shaped, I can drive to some warm place and live in the sucker
> while things get sorted out, which is a terrific improvement on
> several possible alternatives. And speaking completely frankly, I'm
> in a population that is prone to having the world get ahead of them
> sometimes, and my much-loved USAA has declined to insure my life even
> though I've been a faithful customer since 1976. So entirely aside
> from (unlike yourself) simply loving the beasts to death, there's a
> serious practical reason why it's important to me to keep one around,
> even though I'm not always sure how to do it, and for both financial
> and personal reasons it doesn't get the up to the minute maintenance
> I would wish it to.
>
> Yours,
> David
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