:bashI feel like I'm overlooking the obvious but I have to ask anyway. Have a 1982 Koehring 2150 Skat Trak skid steer with a 60hp. Kubota Inline 6cyl. diesel. The machine will start to build heat after about 15 min. of moderate to heavy engine load. It will climb to about 200-205 on the gauge and assume will keep going if work is continued. After shut off and a short heat soak coolant pukes out the overflow tube. We just bought this machine and don't know the maintenance history,but here's what we did. Pulled the radiator and had it flow tested. No issues and core was fine. Put in NEW Kubota waterpump and T-stat. Helped a little but still not right. Ordered a new aluminum rad. biggest one that I can make fit and will install as soon as received. Fan moves good air out the back of machine,and will actually cool back down to 180 if allowed to idle after it reaches 200. There's no black "goo" being forced out the exhaust or any odd colored smoke during operation.Has good power and no misfires or other running issues. It will run at 150-160 at 3/4 throttle with no load for hours. Hope the radiator upgrade does it but if not I'm running out of ideas. I imagine head gasket is next but don't want to miss the forest because of the trees!! Thanks for any ideas!!
Welcome to the forum hellwig492. :usa Just a thought, nothing more, but have you checked that engine ignition timing is not too far advanced?
If you remove the rad cap after it has warmed up can you see bubbles of compression escaping from the top of the coolant level and out the top of the radiator?
Well worth the check. We had a machine that we had the injection pump rebuilt and the guy who reinstalled it used the wrong timing mark. It was only about a 1/4 inch on a 6 inch gear, maybe 3 or 4 degrees but we chased overheating problems for some time. Putting it right solved the problem.
As far as bubbles in the rad. goes it will spew 1 or 2 pea sized bubbles with the engine at 3/4 throttle about every 3-4 min. I bought a block tester with the blue die that turns color if exh. gas is detected so I'll try that next. I'm an auto tech not much on diesels so the timing is a little out of my knowledge base, but I also bought a Kubota engine manual so I guess now is good time to learn.Thanks for the leads and I'll keep you posted.
Thanks Hellwig, Please keep us posted. It is really nice to hear what the final issue is even if we are way off. It's a learning process for me as well. I like to put them in the memory bank, that at my age usually only stores the data for a week or so Another thing to consider is because of lack of previous history, and if the dye check results in a positive for compression gas then it is possible the engine has gone through an overheat condition recently and the result hopefully is a head gasket, or warped head but also maybe possibly a cracked head. Just some more ideas to ponder.
I believe this fixed.I installed an aluminum rad. which brought the temp. down to 180-190. So far so good. Thanks for all the ideas!
Hopefully you are good to go; but I have also seen an exhaust leak from the other end of engine comp blow enough heat on radiator to cause these symptoms. I chased that one for days.