RE: Major Antifreeze Leak!

[Jim Grammer <jimg@domain.elided>]

>Hi Gang-
>	I had a development in my heater fix.  Unfortunately it's a bad one.  I
>noticed an antifreeze smell driving this morning, looked at the passenger
>floorboard and saw a wet streak coming down from the heater box where it 
meets
>the firewall.  The next right turn I made had antifreeze POURING out of 
the
>access hatch on the side of the box.  Literally, it looked like I was 
losing
>3/4-1 cup on each turn.  It started splashing over to the driver's side 
and
>was making the gas pedal slippery.  This is a bad thing.  <snip>

No doubt! It reminds of the antifreeze green and very strange smelling fog 
that came boiling out the defroster vents in the '64 T-all one day. 
Special....

Seems IH, like many others back in days when, used a heater core flow 
control valve that relies on a rubber diaphragm to seperate coolant from 
the outside world. You guessed it, with age the diapragm fails, leading to 
really messy adventures. In my case, the crack in the diaphragm was 
spraying hot coolant over a hot heater core, making green steam that the 
fan happily launched up the defroster ducts. I'll confess to still having 
the heater out of this truck(don't really matter, now the engine/tranny are 
out as well), but I did get a different valve to use. I had the guy at the 
parts store pull out a parts bin of heater control valves and grabbed one 
that used a plastic ball valve and had about the right mounting tabs. No 
idea what the application is, I suspect you could use the same technique, 
comparing to the old unit.

Jim