Diesel engine cooling-radiator ghetto repair

For this years EMF camp I was traveling together with the belgian embassy. We had two busses filled with people and material to drive from belgium to the campsite and back.

One of the busses had a blown tire on our way, that was fixed by fitting the spare:

Blown tire

On our return trip however, we had a major issue. The radiator was leaky, as seen in this picture. The water on the road used to be in the cooling system.

busWe did discuss how to fix it. One option was to just put an egg into the cooling liquid, in the hope that the protein would coagulate and stop the leak. But that is a process we can’t control, so we switched our focus to other methods.

Next up was soldering. We had lots of solder-equipment with us, after all we were coming form a hacker-camp. But soldering on a heat-sink is doomed to fail. Perhaps we could have done it with a propane torch, but we did not have one with us.

All that was left was to glue it. I had some 5-Minute-Epoxy at hand. First we drained the radiator and dried it with the hot-air. Then some cleaning using wire-brushes and isopropanol was done. The epoxy was mixed and stuffed into the radiator with tootpicks and other pointy objects, then heat-cured with the hotair for 30minutes.

This is how it looked after the curing:

radiatorIts messy and ugly, but it did seal the leak. I did expect that it would still leak a little, but to our surprise it was perfectly sealed. The cooling system was even able to build up pressure again.

With that repair we made it back over the canal back to belgium 🙂