I'll start from the beginning...

A year ago shortly after buying the car used, it began to overheat. I never allowed to get too hot. I noticed that the thermostat was stuck closed, and upon replacing the therm, didnt have the problem again.

The car has the following symptoms...

• Engine Oil in the Coolant Res Only
• Boiling Coming from Res
• The Upper Rad Hose Exploded with Major force tonight
• The Therm is stuck closed again
• Car has no smoke, no loss of power, runs great
• Car does not overheat
• Engine oil looks clean. Not milky
• Coolant that poured from rad when I removed the Upper Rad hose looked perfect

I'd like to bleed the coolant. The biggest question is... why is there engine oil in my coolant reservoir, but not in the rest of the system?

 

I would check if the coolant system has leak. Many chain auto store have a tool that allows you to pressurize the coolant system. If it can not hold the pressure for very long, then you have a problem.

Also why did the hose explode? Was it old and needed to be replace? Check the other hose to see how old/bad/spongee they are. If not that bad then you might have something clogging you collant system.

Why oil only in resevoir only? As oil floats on water maybe it is not as obvious elsewhere.

You could have either a bad head gasket, hold in block and if you have 2.7 motor a bad water pump.

dlm4ut

 

Oil of any amount isn't supposed to be in cooling system. The nature of head gaskets design. is to use "O" rings to seal their passages Water and oil both pass through the head gasket. The sealing rings around the combustion chamber may be fine but the "O" rings fail. This is common failure in all makes at some point. It just some motors tend to be more premature than others.

 

My daughter bought the car 2.4L automatic without checking it out. Finally brought it over to me to look at and found the trans fluid in dire shape. Black!
Trans shifts ok [ I don't know how] but anyway tran. needs service. My question is: Can the torque converter be drained from an inspection cover at the bell housing? Thanks.

 

The shop manual doesn't supply any procedure for draining the torque converter. Your best bet is probably to take it to a place with a fluid changing machine. They disconnect the cooling lines, hook them up to the machine and flush the whole system including the torque converter and cooling lines. The disadvantages are that they don't change the filter and it's still pretty expensive, probably because of all the fluid they use. I have seen methods on the internet where people disconnect the cooling lines and run the engine to pump almost all the old fluid out You need to have somebody with his hand on the key to shut it down as soon as the fluid stops coming out. It gets a lot more out than merely dropping the pan. Still, the capacity of the transmission is something like 13 quarts. Dropping the pan will remove something like 4 or five quarts and pumping out the fluid through the cooling lines gets something like 9 quarts. That still leaves a gallon or more of old fluid in there.
I had mine done at a Valvoline shop several years ago. They were a bit new at it then, but they ran their machine until the fluid was nice and pink, not brown any more. They have since doubled the price of the service once they realized how much fluid they were using, and like I said, they don't drop the pan and change the filter.

 

Thanks. I'm not going to change the filter at this point. From experience by dropping the pan on a car with the fluid in this condition can create problems. Whatever has settled in the pan can stay there. But a fluid flush has to be done. The fact this trans. shifts as well as it does with the fluid this black amazes me. These trans. must be be pretty tough. Thanks again. Next time I got to watch where I post!

 

Since you are not dropping the tranny pan and changing the filter and you want the gunk to stay in the pan, it may be a good idea to spend a couple of bucks and stick a small strong magnet onto the bottom of the outside of the tranny pan. Although there is a magnet inside the pan, having one on the outside can help catch and hold a few more particles as the one inside is probably completely covered with ick.

I found that when I dropped the pan on my 2002 Sebring the internal magnet was completely covered with ick. Also had a heck of a time trying to get the gasket to make a proper seal when I bolted the pan back onto the housing.

 

Thanks for the advice. What I finally did was take a small pump with a hose and went down the dip stick tube into pan. pumped out what was in the pan then started car just long enough to get some more fluid in the pan and pumped that out. All together I was able to get out about 6 quarts. Added fluid drove it around then repeated procedure. Took good while to do it this way but at least now the fluid looks 80% better than it did.

 

A simple matter, because overheating is damaged head gasket engine. Oil by its failure to get into the liquid coolant. I recommend not to drive the car to replace the damaged gasket, you can erase the engine.