Thread: V8 Engine Failure due to coolant leak

G'day All,

My Disco 2 V8 (2003) is now very dead. Looking for words of wisdom from the group.

The other week I had the exhaust system play up - a major hole appeared in the down-pipe assembly just beyond the exhaust manifold. I nursed the old girl home but I don't know how much abnormal stress this placed on the whole system. Lot's of noise, not much power, I would have left it to be looked at where it broke down - but a) we were in the middle of nowhere (out on the Brindabella road between Canberra and Tumut) and b) it was Easter Sunday.
I got someone in Canberra to weld up the hole last week.

This past weekend we did a camping trip - Canberra/Snowy Mountains/Canberra - the majority of the trip being uneventful. That is until the return leg, about 50KM's south of Canberra in Namadgi National Park.

The cooling system warning light (red LED) came on, rapidly followed by the car starting to sound like it was a diesel (not something you'd expect in a V8!). I was in one of those ideal locations with a cliff to one side of the car, and not much room on the other, so finding a safe place to stop took a minute, maybe two.

I don't expect this delayed response did the engine any favours. When I did manage to stop the car in a safe spot there was coolant leaking out at a rate of knots, steam everywhere - quite a sight. This wouldn't have been so bad, but it was still about a 4 hour walk to the nearest phone signal and I had my 8 and 12 y.o. with me.

To cut a long story short, we hitched a lift, the Mrs rescued the kids and left me to it!... I called NRMA, got a flatbed tow truck to come out to the car. The truck's air brake system played up, and as we had some very steep hills to descend, common sense prevailed and they radioed for a second flatbed truck to come and collect the car....time ticked by and we eventually dropped the car off at a local garage around 6pm (the original failure happened around 9am!).

An initial eyeball by the garage says there was a split hose that looked to be the culprit. Given the car has been running well for two years I'm speculating - could the stress of driving it with a breached exhaust down-pipe and/or the welding have contributed to the hose splitting? Maybe... I haven't seen which hose they are talking about yet - but from a quick look at things on the afternoon when it happened it looked like the leak was coming out of somewhere near the general area close to the water pump - and not from the radiator or any of the obvious/visible hosing.

One other thing about the cooling system that does start to ring bells - is that I have been slightly (maybe 50ML/month?) topping up the coolant reservoir over the past 6 months, whereas previously I didn't need to. I put that down to it being summer and didn't think much of it. In hindsight this might be related to the catastrophic failure on Sunday. It would have paid me to be more diligent.

The plan is for the garage to replace the split hose, refill the cooling system, run tests and then give me the news on how bad the damage is.

I suppose this could go anywhere from a replacement hose & labour or maybe a blown head gasket, all the way through to a destroyed engine.

Given 2003 V8's aren't particularly worth a great deal these days I may have to make a decision as to whether it's economically sensible to fix the existing engine, replace it with a donor engine (which itself may have problems) or scrap the car.

The rest of the car is in reasonable knick - so I would prefer to keep the old girl going, but I don't want to throw a lot of money at something that's been under a lot of stress, get into a situation where on the surface it looks like it's ?fixed? just for something else to go wrong (and cost $$$'s) a bit down the track.

I'd be interested if anyone has any indicative figures based on different scenarios (from best to worst-case) on what I might be up for?

It's my daily driver and beyond changing the oil I don't have the time or skills to do this myself - so we're talking $$$'s in labour for anything beyond a simple fix.

Oh and to top it all off? About 45 minutes before the engine failure some yahoo sped past me in the other direction on a dirt/rock track, launched a rock directly at us and made a huge crack in a windscreen I'd only replaced around Christmas time...

better off selling it on here,,