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That time a simple coolant flush saved a $15,000 engine job
Last month, a fleet truck came in with a rough idle and white smoke. The owner was sure it was injectors, maybe even a cracked head. I pulled the coolant filter housing first, just to check, and found it completely clogged with casting sand from a bad factory block. A full flush and new filters fixed it in an afternoon. The guy was ready to spend thousands on a teardown. Has anyone else caught a major problem just by starting with the cheap stuff?
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shanef3412d ago
Doubt that casting sand alone would cause white smoke and a rough idle bad enough to make someone think it was a head crack. A clogged filter housing would cause overheating long before those symptoms. Sounds like there was maybe another issue that got fixed by accident during the flush, or the story got simplified.
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Shane's point about overheating coming first makes sense on paper, but I've seen it play out the way the OP described. On those big diesel engines, a totally blocked coolant filter can mess with the flow through the EGR cooler and cause all sorts of weird running issues, including that white smoke. It doesn't always follow the textbook order of failure. Sometimes the cheapest check really does point straight to the core problem before you start throwing expensive parts at it.
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