It took several more days of investigation and another couple gallons of coolant but I was able to pinpoint the issue.  The leak was not always present so it involved frequently squeezing myself under the car with a flashlight a couple times a day.  It looks like the water pump seals were on the way out and hemorrhaging coolant from the weep hole when the seal was not doing it’s job.

Couple shots from under the car showing how bad it could sometimes be.

So I drained all the coolant out and yanked the pump.  Here you can see the wet spot under the impeller pulley where the coolant was coming out.

A side by side of the pumps.  All nice and shiny now.  That probably won’t last for long.  I considered putting in a 160* thermostat to run the engine cooler but decided to stick with a new stock 187* one for now.

I also picked up a flush kit and connected it to the water hose and one of the heater hoses since I have not had heat in this car since I bought it.  Not worrying about that sooner came back to bite me last week when we had all that rain and cold making it so I couldn’t defrost my windshield and could barely see to drive home some nights.  There was quite a bit of brown gunk and rust that came out of the heater core.  I was also able to see it built up inside the hoses.  Looks to be old Dex-Cool build up from when the previous owner went to running straight water and eventually green without flushing the system first causing the Dex-Cool to gel up when mixed with other coolants.  The core and hoses need replacing but that was not in the books for today but on the books for the future.  At least now I have heat and will be able to defrost when needed.  Also took the opportunity to ditch those damned spring clamps and replace them with worm clamps.  That will cut a decent amount of time and cursing off the project if I need to take the pump off again.

Today on the way home from work the Check Gauges light came on.  So the first thing that went through my mind was, “Time to feed the beast again”.  But no, I still had around half a tank so I did a quick glance around and my temp was about to red line.  I quickly pull over and shut off, hop out and take a gander under the hood.  I see a couple spots of what might have been anti-freeze but it was difficult to tell since it’s been raining non-stop for about a week now and everything stays wet.  I do a quick feel of all the coolant hoses and they are hot so I know that there is liquid moving through them but they did feel a bit lacking.

I hop back in the car and the temp had already gone back down into the norm.  Thought to myself WTF.  So I start her back up and start heading back down the interstate again only to have the same thing happen again maybe a mile down the road.  The temp gauge would go wildly back and forth while driving sometimes so I was beginning to think it might either be the sensor or the gauge itself.

I limp into a gas station and go to relieve the pressure in the cooling system to see if it actually is fluid related.  It boils over but only between 1-2 ounces.  Well, there’s you’re problem!  The rad was pretty empty.  So I head inside and get extorted by the station for $15 for a gallon of coolant and a small funnel.  It chugs down the entire gallon and still looks thirsty.

I button it up and get her started again.  The temp holds at the norm.  Good, so I hop in soaked with freezing rain and head back to the house.  No more issues at that point.  At home I was able to squeeze in about another 1/3 qt of coolant and let it run for a bit, it looks to be happy now but I will have to look at it some before heading to work in the morning.

Now I just need to find out why I was missing around 1/3 of my total coolant.  I have not seen any coolant leaks on my garage floor or anywhere else lately, just the normal PS fluid that I am already aware of leaking out.  Here is hoping that I don’t find it in my engine oil where I go to change that this weekend.

It’s always the small things that cause you the largest annoyances.  For example the other day I noticed that my driver side headlight was not coming all the way up so I pulled over into a lot to check it out.  You can just imagine my shock when I saw that the reason for this was that the edge of the hood was firmly wedged under the headlight.  I could not for the life of me imagine why this could be so I closed the lights to investigate.  The light was now most definitely resting higher than the edge of the hood.  I began cursing as I tried to think what could cause this to happen, someone trying to sit on the car that shouldn’t have, something heavy being knocked onto the car in a lot, ect.  After several minutes of fiddling around with trying to “re-adjust” both the corner of the hood and the light enclosure, I noticed something odd about a space on the supports.  There was an empty hole where the hood bumper support was supposed to be.  So, apparently it became fed up with this hard lived live and took a dive.  In addition this left a nice set of scratches in the paint along the front edge of the hood.  All this left me in the awkward position of having to pop the hood latch in order to turn my lights on and then having to walk around and then close the hood.

I went by the stealership the next day to inquire about getting a replacement and decided to just pickup a whole set for both trunk and hood since this is apparently the only part they don’t mark up 5000%.  Took them 4 days to finally get in what they claimed would be there the next morning so I swung by to pick them up.  Of course, like most other parts for these cars, it is not an exact match as they had changed the design.  This one being shorter than the original and I have to set it so that it is dangerously close to falling out in order to hold the hood in it’s proper place.  So a little more work will be required to get everything squared away.  Most likely something to pad the hood indention where the bumper meets so it doesn’t have to be so loosely connected.

Such a small, cheap thing to cause so much grief

The next offender on the list is something we often take for granted, the key fob.  I only received a single key and fob when I bought the car a little over a year ago.  I’ve long since had some door, t-top and trunk keys cut so I would have a back up, but when you have the alarm set and use the door key it will still go off if you are not quick enough to put the ignition key in.  The trunk button on the fob never really worked in the first place but over the last couple of weeks it has been getting to where I would have to repeatedly push the buttons over and over using the edge of my nails to get them down as far as possible just to lock and unlock the doors.  Not fun in the rain.  I finally became fed up with messing around with cleaning the contacts, button pad and battery and just ordered a replacement.  It finally came in today and while I hated shelling out that kind of money for such a small and simplistic device, I am very glad I did.  I quickly programmed it to go with the car and now I barely even have to touch the buttons and they work flawlessly.

You can see a side by side of how worn out the old one is compared to the shiny new and functional unit