What was your bleed sequence.
This is kind of vital on a 300 tdi, and it's a specific bleeding method, a bit different to your average car.
Without special tools involved, the two easiest ways to bleed are:
1/. use a drink bottle of some type propped into the filler neck of the expansion tank, and fill er up till the drink bottle is half full or so... and bleed it off at the thermostat housing
2/. unbolt the expansion tank and hoick it up higher with some prop type thing .. maybe 4-6 inches, if the hoses allow. Then bleed again as per above.
if you notice the pattern here, the issue with bleeding is that the level of coolant at the expansion tank needs to be considerably higher than the motor(more specifically the bleeder nut on the thermostat housing).
The 3rd way you can do it is to use a rad pressure testing type kit to produce pressure at the expansion tank, usually whilst it's still cold.
This is now my preferred method(having got a pressure kit).
method 1/ was provided by member blcknight here, and I buggered that up first time and started overheating on first test drive. Pulled up and (had tools) did again at a servo .. and having purchased a drink I didn't really need, got it right for the test drive home.
Then I moved to method 2/ which lost a lot less coolant than method one, and better result were had when D1 was parked nose higher(so to speak).. such as jacked up at front, or rears parked at the low point of a driveway.
Then having got the pressure testing kit for my D2 .. it had the cap adapter for the D1, so pressure bleeding works first time, every time.
Also note you said you noticed it wasn't getting hot. If you based this observation via the dash temp gauge .. you need to re think the notion. I think the dash gauge doesn't show it's getting hot until a bit over the 110°C mark of the coolant temp!
So the likelyhood was that it probably DID get hot .. it just didn't indicate this in a more accurate manner for your consideration.
My personal opinion on the 300 tdi is that a coolant temp gauge is more important as an accessory than a low coolant alarm. Mine has a very very very slow leak in the rad core, and loses about 1 lt of coolant per couple of months. Being such a long time and being pretty much lazy, I sometimes forget to remember the reminder I set myself the night before to check and top up... so I 'regularly' drive with the coolant a low level in the expansion tank ... never heats up(runs regularly in the low 80's to high 70's).
The other gauge of importance is an EGT(if you are going to attempt a tweak on the injector pump to get a little bit of power from the underpowered donk), and then I find the oil temp gauge is handy on very hot days.
My point in this reply is really to highlight that you may not have bled the system 'properly' .. before concluding that the HG has popped.
Oh! .... and welcome to the North Coburg 300Tdi owners club!
Arthur.
'99 D1 300Tdi Auto
'03 D2 Td5 Auto
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