Overheating?

[Heinz]

Hi in the Forum!
I had the overheating problem too with my WC52, but only when moving up mountains with higher acceleration - I found out that my engine was running lean - that problem disappeared as soon as I adjusted the gas mixture to "more rich" on the adjusting screw outside of the carb.

My carburetor is a Carter - on this carburetor it is also important that the gasket of the carb - cover is 100% intakt, otherwise the gas mixture gets lean as well.
As mentioned further up in an earlier post a lean running engine can be diagnosed by a look into the exhaust endpipe - if it is not dark black there, your engine may run lean and will overheat.

[June J]

Thanks Heinz,
I have solved the problem, it was a faulty temperature gauge.

Kind regards

Ian

[June J]

And finally we have a resolution!
I recently did a 100 mile (160km) round trip and found that I had lost 4 litres of coolant, and the Murphy temp gauge was showing erratic readings like the original gauge.

I topped off the radiator and fired the engine up, with a sheet of cardboard over the radiator. Once the engine was hot I removed the radiator cap and noticed bubbles in the coolant. End game was a blown head gasket on No 4 & 5 blowing combustion gas into the cooling system on the extreme right
side of the combustion chamber.

Not only that, the nitrile gasket on the top of the thermostat was thicker than it should have been and this was distorting the thermotsat valve, causing erratic opening/closing.

She now climbs to 180 F and stablises at that.

Why did the head gasket fail? Well I can only surmise the the gasket I installed when I built the engine (an original DCPD gasket on unknown vintage) had perhaps lost some of its "compressability" over the probably 60+ years since its manufacture (I know I have). This is my theory based upon the fact that both the top deck of the cylinder block and the mating face of the cylinder head were resurfaced during the build, and the head nuts retorqued after the engine was warmed up.

I did not use copper spray sealant on the gasket, I did on the new gasket!

Cheers

Ian

[Kaegi]

ive run into that on the tstat before. glad its worked out