General auto repair questions answered

[Piotrsko]

Ok other than filling up small passages like blood clots in a stroke, exactly what damage do you observe on a stop leak treated engine?

Dont spare the miniscule details.

[Fat Charlie]

The lack of cooling that those clots create can cause all sorts of damage.

It's more like a tourniquet- an expedient that will cause more damage the longer it's left in place.

[California98Civic]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

Ok other than filling up small passages like blood clots in a stroke, exactly what damage do you observe on a stop leak treated engine?

Dont spare the miniscule details.

I don't know about "damage," but what the products sales pitch does not tell us (but we should be able to guess) is that it affects both the leaking seal and the perfectly fine seals. So, a few years ago I tried to treat my persistent oil leak problem with Stop Leak. It worked for a about 6,000 miles. Then leaking returned. Much later, doing some valve settings, I also needed to replace some oil seals, one on a valve cover bolt and one for a spark plug. I noticed all four spark plug seals had a gummy surface quality and scaped with a screwdriiver pretty easily. That expansion is what the product is designed to do to oil seals throughout the engine. Just an observation. The seals were not leaking. I have had no special problems of any kind that I thought attributable to the Stop Leak.

[Xist]

If stop leak will plug up small leaks, it will also plug up small openings that you really want to stay clear.

I understand using it in an emergency, but if you can get your hands on stop leak, you can probably get a tow truck.

[me and my metro]

I have found radiator stop leak pellets in the bottom of an oil pan blocking the pickup screen. Stop leak is stop leak right? So radiator stop leak should also fix oil leaks....

One tube of powdered stop leak to delay a radiator replacement lead to an oil cooler replacement on a 6.7L Ford Diesel.

[Fat Charlie]

We had a "customer" once who needed a heater core. And balked big time at the price. The writer offered to throw in some Stop Leak, top it off and send him on his way. Not much over a year later the same "customer" was back with another cooling problem. He was indignant that he needed a whole lot more this time and claimed he never would have agreed to the Stop Leak if he had known it would do this to his precious car.

He "agreed" to get out of the shop the first time for as close to nothing as possible, and convinced himself that since he had no heat when he came in and did have heat when he left, that we had fixed it- he just outsmarted us into charging him less for the fix. He got the same writer on his second visit, who shut him down, saying "This is the quote. If you had done this one part last year like I told you, you wouldn't be here today needing it and all these others. Now sign the estimate or get the hell out."

We didn't sell him anything that day, but on the positive side, he never came back. Those were the only two times he ever came in, but he claimed to be a customer.

[Piotrsko]

Okay so bunches of anecdotal data, nothing concrete with pictures.

I ask this because once I ran this stuff constantly for a 100K miles in the 318 powered surfer van I had and on teardown for rebuild found no damage or restrictions or residues in the coolant passages after a garden hose flush through the heater line. Had the radiator recored with a 4 row, the rebuilder found the rock damage by the pooling of stop leak.

[Xist]

Video is better than photographs:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=76GpMD4LIwY

I almost bled to death one time, but I drank stop-leak, and it fixed me right away!

How about tire stop-leak? That stuff is awesome, right?

[Fat Charlie]

Tire Stop Leak is my favorite!

[California98Civic]

This is a diagnosis question, I guess, and so I hope it fits your thread.

I have a 60 ahr lead acid deep cycle battery relocated into the trunk of my 1998 Civic. The battery is failing. That's the second time in a year.

My main suspect is an over-draining incident in Nov/Dec when the car was offline and the battery drained down to about 60%. It had been awesome before, but afterward it started to show difficulty almost immediately after.

But I want to be thorough before throwing more money at another battery. How would I test for (1) parasitic losses, (2) poor charging voltage from my alternator, (3) poor charging from my three-stage onboard grid charger, and (4) too-high resistance from cables used to relocate the battery to the trunk.

Thanks for this great thread idea.