New thermostat on S14 KA24DE and now it overheats very quick

[jt15833]

Hi guys, I believe this to be an issue with bleeding the system and while I have looked through a bunch of threads about bleeding/overheating, the bleed procedure is still unclear to me.

Setup - Stock KA24DE, koyo radiator, Defi coolant temp gauge w/ sender in upper radiator hose. Boiling-water method tested thermostat, recently filled the system with ~1.5 gallons coolant.

Quick background - I swapped in a used KA24DE recently and am just trying to get this damn thing running like stock. After installing it ran good, no leaks of any sort, except it would rarely get up to temperature. 140F was normal, maybe around 170 in traffic. So I got an OEM thermo and went to replace it and found nothing to replace, so I installed it. Some idiot was running this thing thermoless. After installing and filling w/ coolant, I used the bleed procedure outlined below. However I can't drive the car more than 2 miles if it's been warmed up without my Defi reading 200+. NOT GOOD!

Ok so to bleed here is what I did
-Jack front of vehicle up a good bit
-Undo bleed screw, and rad cap. Fill system til the radiator is full - nothing came out of the bleeder hole
-Then I ran the car, after about 5 minutes I saw coolant starting to splash out of the bleeder so I closed that. A few minutes later the radiator filler started splashing pretty aggressively, so I closed that.
-After this I tried to let it run but it climbed too hot and I shut it down.
-I allowed the car to cool and tried to fill it up but the system didn't want to take much more. The reservoir become emptied once but then I filled it and it was full for good.

Am I doing something very wrong here? My CA18 was easy as pie to bleed. I have heard about squeezing the lower rad hose during this whole bleeding process and will try it. I get another opportunity tomorrow to work on the car, so any advice is appreciated.

BTW, I read in another thread that if the thermo works it can only be air bubbles causing something like this, but what about blockages? What I am afraid of is the the previous engine owner removed the thermostat because of another more serious, underlying issue and I don't want to have this be the case, obviously. When I think about the coolant system, if the pump works, and the thermo works, and the radiator isn't blocked, what can go wrong? Can the engine have a blockage somewhere? But this would probably show high temps even w/ the thermo removed. Bah. this f'ing car

Thanks!

[biggie]

Still an air bubble it sounds like.

Only other option would be bad thermo, non-OEM ones have been known to have issues.

[jt15833]

That's what I thought, I even took it out after installing it once, and testing it in a pot of water. It started to open while small bubbles were forming on the bottom of the pot, a good bit from boiling. The thermo is rated at 76.5*C so this checks out. I wish I had a thermometer though.

I researched some more and seems like this happens a lot with the KA24, I will jack it up and run it again with the bleeder and rad. cap open. I understand to close the bleeder when I see a steady stream of coolant but what about the rad. cap? Should it get up to temperature with it off, and be able to leave it off? ie; coolant isnt spewing out of the radiator.

[biggie]

Yes, very common to have hard to remove air bubbles in the KA.

Yes, leave the rad cap off. I normally put a large funnel in the top and fill it about 1/2 way with water/coolant to help bleed.

[jt15833]

just got done driving the car about 30 minutes on the highway home, after what I think to be a successful bleeding. The two things I did different were

kept bleed screw off until coolant flowed constantly out of the hole, then capping it. Obviously don't let this occur for too long, but make sure it's complete liquid coming out.

used a funnel with a neck slightly smaller than radiator fill tube, so it could firmly sit in there, and I could keep a bit of coolant in there while the car was running. I think this helped to prevent air from coming back in, which isn't a big issue imo, but it's also easy to see bubbles escaping, which feels good

the car runs at a steady 180*F during anything above idle, but unfortunately I see 195*F at idle if I let the car sit for about 2 minutes. If I rev the car at 2k rpm while sitting still, the temperature quickly falls back to 180*F. is this normal?

[biggie]

Yeah, that temp at idle is normal. Stock fan doesn't even usually doesn't turn on until like 210 degs.

[S13xCrazy]

Do you have any heat?

If not, blown headgasket. Sounds like maybe he was having overheating problems, and took the thermostat out to "fix" the problem. Everytime I have blown a headgasket on a 240 i get "bubbles" out of my rad cap. But they are from compression getting into the cooling system, not normal air pockets.

[jt15833]

Heat is great. The other day with the car cold and not yet started I removed the bleeder screw and squeezed the top tube, I could tell I had air still in the system because no coolant came out of the hole even when I sqeezed the tube a good bit. So I proceeded to

remove rad cap
insert a good size final into the rad neck, it stuck there
filled the system thru the funnel til coolant came out of the screw
closed the screw
ran the car til warm (with funnel still in it)
squeeze upper/lower rad hoses a good bit

I shut it off when it got around 180. let the funnel sit there with some tinfoil over it so nothing fell in and let it cool. After it was cool I pulled the funnel and put the cap on.

After this my temps stay between 180-185 most the time. I'm happy.