I have a 37 Buick Special with a 52 263ci straight eight engine and a Vintage Air heat/cool unit. The a/c will give you frost bite but will throw out heat for only about 15 seconds. I parked my Ranger pickup beside the Buick and ran long heater hoses from the Ranger to the Buick and heater worked fine. Has to be the water pump but it keeps the engine cool with the a/c running on 100* days. Have run a wire in the heater hose nipple on the w-p and feel no blockage. With either hose disconnected and engine running it flows coolant but with almost zero pressure. Can stop flow by capping hose with thumb and exerting almost no pressure. I don't want to hear "water pump" because it's a pure bitch to change out with the near zero radiator clearance so hoping for other suggestions. Thank you.
Seriously though, if it works off the donor mobile then the core is fine. You have blockage or inadequate flow from the pump. Could be a blocked line, I had a stent a year ago, all my lines were hooked up but not flowing. Glad it wasn't my pump as it is hard to change out as well.
According to this map that is current for today feb 5 2020 at 1:40 PM Pacific time a hell of a lot of people do. Having lived in Central Texas and frozen my ass off in winter I can never figure out why guys make comments like that. Texas isn't all Padre Island Where it is a balmy 48 today. Looks like it is colder in Amarillo than Illinois too. Coilover I am going with the blocked passageway or maybe even a kinked hose. I'd doubt it was the pump because it doesn't have overheating issues when it is hot out. You might try running that long piece of hose from the inlet and outlet on the engine and run it and see if the hose gets hot with nothing but hose connected. Same as bypassing the heater with a longer hose. The hose should get up to engine temp. The only other things I can think of are air lock in the heater due to location or that the thermostat (you do have one?) is opening and keeping the engine temp too low to get enough heat to the heater or it works so well that coolant flow to the heater isn't what you need.
A blocked passage would cause a coolant circulation problem.....but a corroded hole in the pump or thermostat would cause a loss of pressure and would not push the coolant through the heater core. v2 cents
I sounds like a flow issue but that is almost never the pump. Are the heater hoses connected to the factory locations? I'm not familiar with the 263 so I don't know how they should be set up. I have seen someone hook both hoses to the water pump so there was no flow (both were on the suction side.)
Just a couple things i've seen. You aren't running a pressure cap on an old Billows therm.stat? I didn't think so, but saw a fast car pull out of a dozen races rather than cook the engine. I brought it up to them, shouldn't have. then he started beating me occasionally. I had this on a big hyd. hose on a backhoe. Would dig perfect for a few min., then get slower and slower. Couldn't find the problem till the main feed hose Blew. Replaced the hose. FIXED. I chop sawed the old hose into pieces & found the inner liner separated from outers, apparently the inner had a small leak & would gradually fill with oil between layers & choke off the flow. Don;t know if your hose is more than 1 layer, but just a thought. Not an ap. here, but I cut every other impeller [ vane] off the wat. pump on the Buick 320. when building it.. Everything ran 10 years,twice a week, [except one rod and one block] about 10,000 laps, same wat. pump. and never once got hot, even with a layer of mud on the rad it stayed under 205. It;s been in a lot of parades & stll stays down. Does have 2qt full flow filter, deepened oil pan, and a Big oil cooler. Made from A.C. condenser. + 16 qt. of oil. Donald. [Fireball 5] P.S. BTW If there's any Straight Eight naysayers following this. we never spun a brng. or hurt the crank. They were saying a while back you can't turn the ILBBB over 4000 cuz the crank will break every time. Not true. About yr. 5 or six, laps were getting faster & we were seeing 7g with 6.67 on 3/8 dirt.. That's when #2 rod said goodby, then went to a QC w/ 5.88 & kept it 62 to 6500. Happier there.. Good Luck Robert set up a site on Racing History in Waukon Google .waukonspeedway.com '
It could very well be cavatation...trapped air in the heater core. When you fill a coolant system, think of it as a water level tool...and the 2 highest points are the radiator and the heater. The radiator cap allows air to escape from one end, but without a bleeder, air can be trapped at the other end...the heater.
I was wondering about trapped air as well. Most modern vehicles you have to bleed the system of air. Easy way to to this is jacking up the front of the car, place jack stands underneath, run engine without rad cap for a few minutes to let the cooling system "burp".
Not quite right because there’s High pressure on one side and low pressure on the other of each air pocket
Not necessarily, heater hose outlets don't produce very much pressure...certainly not enough to blast air out of the system. It's more of a circulating system and if there is enough resistance (air) in the core, the water pump will just deflect the water to the radiator.
I had the same problem when I built my car. Discovered the bypass from the thermostat housing to the pump suction was plugged. The heater return hose connects there. I have been in touch with coilover, [ we are birthday "brothers"] , telling him how to unplug. Just has to remove the thermostat housing and a straight shot with a screwdriver [ or drill]. Ben
Ben (firstinsteele) nailed it. The internal bypass passage was plugged. The pressure hose comes off the T-stat housing and the return is in the pump housing on a Buick straight eight (very poor fuzzy picture). Thanks to EVERYONE for the kicking around of ideas. Hose nipples are taped over and painted blue.
Thank you for posting the SOLUTION ! I hate it when someone posts a problem/asks a question...and 3 or 4 pages of HAMBer responses later...we never hear if the problem got solved. Or worse yet, we never hear from the original poster again. It just burns my ass
"I parked my Ranger pickup beside the Buick and ran long heater hoses from the Ranger to the Buick and heater worked fine." That's a darn clever way of testing a heater core.
I'm going to as a dumb question. What is the coolant temperature? Could it be the engine isn't getting hot enough.
Take this train of though and now add in the low pressure side, the suction side, the pressure differential created by the pump. Each one of these examples also do not include a pressure differential. Air gets trapped with a pressure differential in a situation where there is an up and over or when asking fluids to fill a large chamber like
I put a new heater and hoses in a 41 jeep. I hooked it up the way the jeep came in, one hose to the water pump and the other attached to a nipple screwed in the side of the block. heater worked perfectly on a 7 degree day but did not on a 50 degree day. turns out when the thermostat was closed there was flow from the water pump to the heater then back into the block, but once the thermostat opened [never did being cooled by the heater on the 7 degree day] the flow would stop to the heater. there was so much negative pressure, I could remove the hose at the side of the block and water would not come out of the hose or the block. shut the motor off and they would drain right out. turns out the first guy to put the heater in used the drain port on the side of the block. jeep never intended the motor to have a heater so they never drilled and tapped the back of the head. there was a boss, but no hole. I removed the head, drilled and tapped the hole and put a nipple in. moved the hose to the back of the head and the heat worked like expected.
of course I tested it on the cold morning, customer picked it up on the mild day, brought it back not happy. I spent over a day solving the problem, plus found a few problems when the head was off that I never got paid for.
Amen!!! We need to start a task force to follow up on these things, or a search party what if these people have been abducted? Well shit, I'll get my pants on, everybody meet me at the Walmart
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