Rental Car Story II

I came up to a stop light on my way back to the shop and looking to my right across four lanes of traffic I saw a Mondial Cabriolet sitting in a gas station with a big, thick cloud of very white smoke rising from its rear. I recognised the car as one of the rentals and there was a young Japanese couple standing at the rear of the car looking at the white cloud. I was trying to think of a safe and legal way to get to them when they got back into the car and drove off towards Waikiki trailing a plume of white.

At this point, I decided the best thing to do was to go back to the shop and wait for the phone to ring. The call came in about forty five minutes. The poor Mondial made it about half way back to Waikiki. The tow truck delivered the car and it was pushed inside and sat there cooling. The next morning I put water into the cooling system and it poured out between the block and the head on both banks. It had gotten so hot that the plastic on the sparkplug extenders had melted, pooled in the bottom of the well, and hardened. The plastic completely covered the hex on the sparkplugs which made unscrewing the plugs a bit of a problem.

The rental company did not want to open the engine to check for any additional damage, so I removed and repaired the heads. It went back to work as a rental, seemingly no worse for the experience. I did wonder what the rings, cylinders, and bearings looked like after being overheated like that.

 

I did read the thread with the link that you provided. That was painfull. When the black 328 was mentioned in another thread, I couldn't come up with any real recollection of the car. There was one of the rental companies that I did very little work for. If I did work on it, nothing happened that made a real impression on my memory. I did become pretty frustrated towards the end. Overheating was a very common problem with the cars and I pleaded to let me rig up some sort of high temp or low oil pressure kill switch. They never let me do it. After a time, I just gave up. Sometimes, I just was too busy to accomodate these "need it yesterday" repairs.

I am sorry to hear that you had such a rough time with the car, but glad that you saw it through and are now enjoying it. The 328 is a great car.