sewelli

I’m posting this here in the hopes it’ll help someone else. Aproximatly 2 years ago I replaced my radiator. At the same time, since I had the system drained of coolant, I replaced the thermostat and rubber gasket. I DID NOT USE OEM PARTS for that. Three months ago or so, I began to see coolant leaking from the drivers side rear of the motor. The leaking was intermittent at first and minimal. Over time, it worsened and was the worst if I parked the car with the motor hot. When I’d come back in the AM, there would be a huge puddle. It was really hard, and a PiTA, to see where the leak was coming from. I searched the forums for advice and didn’t really find what I was looking for. I finally found t to be the thermostat. I went to Honda this time and coughed up the $ 60-+ for the oem part. The rubber gasket was substantially meatier than the aftermarket part that I had installed before and also had the locating ‘tab’ which the aftermarket part had lacked. Suffice to say, the leak is gone! In retrospect, the fact that it was better or worse depending on engine temp when I parked the car, should have indicated to me the thermostat as the open or closed position of it affected how much it leaked. Anyway, I hope this is helpful for someone out there maybe going through the same thing.

HarryD

+1, glad it worked out!

For me, it's almost always not worth it to take shortcuts -- I typically weigh the few bucks saved vs. "would I want to get under here and redo all this work all over again if it fails?"

I also worry about failure rates and QA testing on mission critical parts -- I'd like to avoid important parts failing at inopportune times (radiators are on that list for me).

Unrelated to your radiator part, but if you've worked anywhere with an engineering org, you can see the amount of testing that goes into parts, particularly OEM parts. Some of these aftermarket companies worry me, especially the fly-by-night ones that can simply outsource production with CAD drawings overseas to the lowest bidding factory and setup online shops in minutes -- the barrier to entry is low nowadays. Are they testing in different conditions? Different materials? Stress tests? Long-term tests?