Antifreeze Coolant flush

Maintenance tips, questions and help.
User avatar
Dino
Posts: 24
Joined: Wed Jul 25, 2012 1:05 pm
I ride: '96 Vulcan 500 LTD
Location: Southern California

Antifreeze Coolant flush

Postby Dino » Tue Dec 11, 2012 7:10 pm

Does anyone have any recommendations or tips any the easiest way to flush out the coolant?
Any help will be appreciated

User avatar
Triangles
Site Admin
Posts: 819
Joined: Sun Dec 27, 2009 10:35 pm
I ride: '94 Black Cherry Vulcan 500, '06 Candyfire Red Vulcan 500 LTD
Location: Toledo Ohio
Contact:

Re: Antifreeze Coolant flush

Postby Triangles » Tue Dec 11, 2012 9:55 pm

a flush really isn't necessary. Opening the the drain plug in the water pump will drain start draining the coolant. It's easiest to unbolt the right foot rest assembly to get at the drain bolt. If you open the fill cap all the coolant will rush out the open plug in very short order. In theory if you don't open the fill cap it will siphon out the overflow tank as well but this will likely take some time to all drain. Otherwise you'd have to remove the gas tank and unbolt the overflow to empty it.

Personally I never bother with the coolant change interval in the manual since doing a valve lash check/adjust every 6k miles requires the coolant to be drained and that is when my coolant is changed.

On my '94 the nimrod previous owner just used straight water with no corrosion inhibitors. The water looked like a very light Iced Tea from the rust floating around in it. I used a chemical flush that I don't think really did much other than rinse more gunk out. I followed the directions on the flush and ran some extra clean distilled water thru the engine to rinse all the flush chemical and anything else out. The water pump was in good shape and showed no signs of corrosion so thankfully this owner only had it this way for the 6 months or so he owned it. I use Peak Global coolant. It's supposedly good for 5+ years which is far longer than it will take me to go 6k miles. Really though almost any coolant except maybe the gasket eating Dexcool coolant should work just fine.
ImageImage

User avatar
Dino
Posts: 24
Joined: Wed Jul 25, 2012 1:05 pm
I ride: '96 Vulcan 500 LTD
Location: Southern California

Re: Antifreeze Coolant flush

Postby Dino » Thu Dec 13, 2012 4:08 pm

Well I noticed there was crust forming around one of the hoses on the left side ( I included a picture with an arrow )
I believe the previous owner used a coolant that contained silicates and/or ingredients harmful to our bikes. I also noticed that there was some dirt in the overflow tank, which is another reason why I wanted to flush out everything.
I actually plan to do a valve adjustment soon as well.
Attachments
121312124637 copy.jpg
121312124637 copy.jpg (214.37 KiB) Viewed 10334 times

User avatar
Triangles
Site Admin
Posts: 819
Joined: Sun Dec 27, 2009 10:35 pm
I ride: '94 Black Cherry Vulcan 500, '06 Candyfire Red Vulcan 500 LTD
Location: Toledo Ohio
Contact:

Re: Antifreeze Coolant flush

Postby Triangles » Sat Dec 15, 2012 5:08 pm

You probably just had some coolant weeping out around the hose. When coolant dries it leaves a white crusty residue. Also when Aluminum oxidizes it turns to a white powder. It's hard to tell what you've got going on there. I wouldn't worry about coolants with silicates Very little has changed with the engine design or more correctly I should say since it's predecessors from the mid '80 when I think all they had was the silicate based green stuff. Only thing to really be careful of is to not mix a silicate coolant with an organic acid coolant (orange dex-cool) as this will cause a reaction between the two the causes the silicates to precipitate and this also uses up the corrosion inhibitors
ImageImage

burkbuilds
Posts: 350
Joined: Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:29 pm
Location: Rome, Georgia

Re: Antifreeze Coolant flush

Postby burkbuilds » Thu Jan 24, 2013 1:59 pm

Ditto on everything Triangles told you. Good advice.


Return to “Maintenance”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests