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Just now, Chewbacka said:

A 1971 mk1 Escort, and later a mk3 Escort which was probably about 1978. 

MK1 Escort uses the top of the radiator as an expansion tank, then had a simple overflow pipe. I had three of those.

Richard

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Just now, RLWP said:

MK1 Escort uses the top of the radiator as an expansion tank, then had a simple overflow pipe. I had three of those.

Richard

I'm sure the overflow went into a bottle, but maybe that was some bodge by a previous owner.  As to the mk3 Escort, all the zig zag cooling webs fell out of the radiator, so it used to overheat quite easily.

As an aside, I also remember that the mk1 radiator was made with a hole through it for a starting handle, but the body didn't have any provision.  A bit of just in case design.  But maybe that was another car...................

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2 minutes ago, Chewbacka said:

I'm sure the overflow went into a bottle, but maybe that was some bodge by a previous owner.  As to the mk3 Escort, all the zig zag cooling webs fell out of the radiator, so it used to overheat quite easily.

As an aside, I also remember that the mk1 radiator was made with a hole through it for a starting handle, but the body didn't have any provision.  A bit of just in case design.  But maybe that was another car...................

That is, indeed, a bodge

I don't remember the starting handle hole

Richard

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Ford starting handles generallywent out of use with the last of the E93A Pops in 1959. But I remember there were a few early 100E and 300E vans and some 400E vans (Consul engine) with them.  The forward control 400E van was very nippy and could run circles round the dreadfully sluggish othe forward control vans like the Commer 15cwt, BMC J2 and the incredibly sluggish Standard Atlas van (nicknamed the snail.

Edited by bizzard
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1 hour ago, Chewbacka said:

A 1971 mk1 Escort, and later a mk3 Escort which was probably about 1978. 

My first car was a 1972 petrol Ford Capri and I'm almost 100% certain that the tank was pressurised. It was one of the first things I learned about car mechanics as a new driver, that you should never release the filler cap until the engine had cooled.

I've now emailed the boat's original fitters, JD of Gailey, and will let you know what they come up with.

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There are some very nicely made alloy expansion tanks for sale on Ebay, cheaper than the plastic ones if you can suss out on what will mate up with your pipe work size wise & you can mount it it would probably be a better fix more so if the type you have is NLA.

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14 minutes ago, X Alan W said:

There are some very nicely made alloy expansion tanks for sale on Ebay, cheaper than the plastic ones if you can suss out on what will mate up with your pipe work size wise & you can mount it it would probably be a better fix more so if the type you have is NLA.

Indeed, and Ray T used one in his post earlier in the thread. We have a lot to thank the boy-racer community for

Richard

Edited by RLWP
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@Froggy, I took my life in my hands, donned life support systems and went into "the pit of doom" (otherwise known as the garage) and found this. I rarely throw anything away in case it may come in use! Looking at the picture of your header tank I think the pipe to the left of the central one may be a non standard addition. As before it is yours for P & P, it is of little use to me. PM me to sort out finer details.

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Edited by Ray T
  • Greenie 1
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5 minutes ago, RLWP said:

Not enough pipes

Richard

Richard, I think the pipe to the LHS of the central lower one in Froggy's photo is an after market addition, it doesn't look original to me - I stand correction though.

image.png.04e1224f2106b4616b9d96b179720a1c.png

 

Edited by Ray T
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2 hours ago, Ray T said:

@Froggy, I took my life in my hands, donned life support systems and went into "the pit of doom" (otherwise known as the garage) and found this. I rarely throw anything away in case it may come in use! Looking at the picture of your header tank I think the pipe to the left of the central one may be a non standard addition. As before it is yours for P & P, it is of little use to me. PM me to sort out finer details.

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Wow. That looks like our tank minus, as Richard notes, one outlet! You may well be right about the other outlet being an aftermarket addition; when i was applying some Araldite yesterday i wondered about the reason why one appears to have a washer and nut attached. I'm now curious to remove the pipe and see how it has been bodged, if in fact that is the case. I'm very interested in your tank Ray, it would save some hassle since you can see from my original photograph that there is minimal space between two of the isolator switches to fit something with even marginally larger dimensions, and re-siting would also be problematic. Let me see what the original fitters have to offer, assuming they reply to my email. If they have a brand new tank hanging about then obviously i would opt for that, but otherwise i would be happy to pay you a few quid for the one you have.

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3 hours ago, Froggy said:

Wow. That looks like our tank minus, as Richard notes, one outlet! You may well be right about the other outlet being an aftermarket addition; when i was applying some Araldite yesterday i wondered about the reason why one appears to have a washer and nut attached. I'm now curious to remove the pipe and see how it has been bodged, if in fact that is the case. I'm very interested in your tank Ray, it would save some hassle since you can see from my original photograph that there is minimal space between two of the isolator switches to fit something with even marginally larger dimensions, and re-siting would also be problematic. Let me see what the original fitters have to offer, assuming they reply to my email. If they have a brand new tank hanging about then obviously i would opt for that, but otherwise i would be happy to pay you a few quid for the one you have.

Odd that the Barrus header tank wasn't fitted when the engine was changed. Perhaps it was to big, which would explain the modification to the bmc tank.

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1 hour ago, Eeyore said:

Odd that the Barrus header tank wasn't fitted when the engine was changed. Perhaps it was to big, which would explain the modification to the bmc tank.

Yeah, interesting indeed. Significant changes were made in the engine bay, since with the original engine the coolant was drawn in from the cut and we now have a redundant mud box etc Maybe there just wasn't room for the Barrus tank without significant bodging, or maybe it was just a case of the existing tank being perfectly serviceable way back in 2002 when the boat was only 5 years old. It was certainly a good bodge because there's no evidence of water seeping from the additional union.

Edited by Froggy
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  • 3 weeks later...

Many thanks to Ray T for the generous supply of the header tank shown in post #37, which is exactly the same model as the one we currently have.

Now to take the pipe off the extra connection on ours as per post #39 to see how they have bodged it. Does anybody have any ideas as to why this might have been done rather than using the redundant connection at the top? You can see the tank we currently have in situ in the top post, and also post #39.

Edited by Froggy
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On 01/08/2017 at 21:13, Ray T said:

When I replaced my central heating header tank which was the same as your BMC one. I bought one of these alloy header tanks, as it is in the engine room. I also replaced the engine header tank, a Leyland one as in the picture by RLWP, with a Renault header tank off eBay. The one with the brown top . I still have the old engine header tank if it is of any use to you. The engine header tank used to sit on top of the Lister LPWS3. You are welcome to it for the cost of P&P unless the CWDF "courier service" is functioning.

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I was looking at using one of those alloy tanks for my Eberspacher - I wasn't sure if you could use alloy in the heating system though, I thought I read something somewhere about corrosion (but that may have been for the gas heater).

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12 minutes ago, Psycloud said:

I was looking at using one of those alloy tanks for my Eberspacher - I wasn't sure if you could use alloy in the heating system though, I thought I read something somewhere about corrosion (but that may have been for the gas heater).

The newish Alde 3000 series have an aluminium heat exchanger so they say you must not use copper pipes and fittings otherwise the heat exchanger acts as an anode and gets eaten away.

That's the only problem I can see with an alloy header tank. I think the Eber type heaters may also use an aluminium heat exchager so no comparability problems with such a header tank.

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28 minutes ago, Tony Brooks said:

The newish Alde 3000 series have an aluminium heat exchanger so they say you must not use copper pipes and fittings otherwise the heat exchanger acts as an anode and gets eaten away.

That's the only problem I can see with an alloy header tank. I think the Eber type heaters may also use an aluminium heat exchager so no comparability problems with such a header tank.

Ah thank you - I think I will proceed with the alloy tank then.

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3 hours ago, Tony Brooks said:

The one at the top is ABOVE the seal on the cap. Its the overflow for when the tank is overfilled so water is ejected as it expands with heating.

Thanks for this. Perhaps we should be fitting a pipe to it to lead hot water into the engine bilge then, rather than directly over the engine!

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Just a few words about JD Narrowboats of Gailey, here, who were the original fitters of our boat back in 1997. I'm pretty miffed with them to be honest. Although the boat manual was written in the pre-email era i found an email address from their website, and first contacted them for advice regarding our inverter, as per a previous long-running thread of mine that some of you will have read. I had absolutely no reply from them and concluded, given the shape of their website, that they were no longer trading. However, i had another shot at this when the header tank issue arose and tried phoning the contact number in the boat manual. To my surprise a very nice lady answered. She turned out to be the sister of one of the guys running the company. We had a very amicable conversation and she said she remembered the boat and told me about some of its history. She seemed to think they would be able to help and suggest that i emailed her brother, giving me, i think, the same email address i'd initially got from the website. Again, no response whatsoever. Now either they have a very poor spam filter (and i suspect that i'm giving them an unwarranted Get Out Of Jail card here) or the guy really can't be a*sed to reply. I suspect that if i'd been making enquiries about a new fit-out though that they'd have been on it without hesitation.

Edited by Froggy
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