I got lucky and found the broken off end lying in the drain pan, so I cleaned up the hole that it fits into in the back of the water pump and now the pipe is back in, as is the T-stat. Now it's just a matter of putting all that stuff back in too, filling it up and running it again to bleed the air out and make sure all is good. I'm leaving Thursday for Texas then on to Phoenix for a week or so, it's needs to be right before I hit the road.
Well, like any job it's not "hard", you just have to take off a shit ton of stuff to get to it.....I see the parts all over the interwebz for far less than I paid at the dealership, and I'd be willing to bet they all come from the exact same source/manufacturer....also, it's a job you'll only do once in your ownership of the car. There are a bunch of YouTube vids on all of these repairs, but the best ones I found were from a place called A1 Auto
OK, so......all back together and it starts, runs, idles and most importantly - doesn't leak! Tomorrow I'll take it for a drive, double check that it's full of water, then run it down the road some. If the heater works properly and it's still not leaking I'll call it good.
Any car that uses plastic parts in something that heat cycles constantly seems like it would be a potential problem. My advice, go online now and buy a t-stat and that connecting pipe while they're available and relatively inexpensive.....and just put them in your spares. Mine lasted 100K, seems like that's a reasonable time for them. Now that I've done the job (twice!) I think I could do it in about 3 hours round trip....... I'm going to do an 80 mile roundtrip up to a friend's and drop off a transmichigan I finished for him, if it makes that OK I'll feel confident that the trip to Texas and Az will go OK too.
Just home from my test run, it actually was closer to 100 miles and there were no issues, so I'm good to go......CoTA here I come!
It wouldn't hurt to insulate that turbocharger, that really knocks down the under hood temperatures and saves the plastic bits. http://www.waymotorworks.com/wmw-turbo-heat-shield.html
At CoTA today.....crewing for this one, we did not have a good day - first it threw the fan blet on the first lap, we got that fixed and it overheated on the way to the grid for our second event. Found that was due to him not getting it full of water after the first overheating happened, got that sorted and now we're ready for tomorrow. Except...... The weather is supposed to turn to shit tomorrow, cold, windy and rainy! Built a race trans for the black one..... And some footage from the grid, this is directly behind where the F1 cars garage when that circus is here.... CoTA 2022 - YouTube
We had no good luck with "our" racecar tho, after overheating in Fri practice due to a thrown fanbelt, we still had overheating issues, then rain on Saturday during the early race and no rain tires, so he decided not to go out but to wait for the 4:30 race. The car overheated before he even made the grid for the second race. I left for Phoenix Sunday morning, but they called and said they had decided to just go out and see if they could get some laps in, maybe at racing speed it would cool off as he'd never had overheating issues before and had checked everything carefully and didn't think the head gasket was blown (I would have pulled the head myself, but not my car) Then while driving it around the pit roads it got stuck in 1st gear and wouldn't come out. Game over. He loaded up and came home..... He'll bring the gearbox over to me when he gets it pulled out and we'll see what happened. I'm in Phoenix now visiting family, in a few days I'll head off to Santa Fe to see a friend, then homeward bound. Weather here has been lovely, warm days and cool nights, while KC keeps going thru their cycles - it'll be high 60's there today and 20 tonight!
Well, some good news on the baby blue Bugeye, the overheating turned out to be the water pump after all - I took it off and could not find anything wrong with it, but he replaced it and all is now good. We also know the issue with 1st gear and he'll be bringing it to me in the next few days to fix it. Also a fairly simple fix....when I get it from him I'll post pics.