I recently flushed my cooling system. No problems, and the car ran just fine, and the temperatures were just fine, after. Today, perhaps the third time I've driven the car since flushing it, it immediately (within five minutes) went over 230, and I shut it down. Interestingly, there was no heat available through the heater.

Is this just a broken thermostat?

I did a search, and couldn't find a DIY on changing the thermostat. The shop manual is worthless. Are there any hints out there, if this is my problem? It looks like the thermostat is located in an unfortunate location, but not otherwise uncomplicated to change (I've changed thermostats on other cars--heck, I've changed engines on other cars, so I know that the actual changing of the thermostat is not an issue, it's getting there).

Thanks.

 

Sounds like an air bubble in the system. It needs to be bled...

 

I Agree!! Air bubbles in the line cause speratic over heating situations!

 

By "bled," do you mean re-flush?

And is there any still-existing DIY on flushing the cooling system? It appears from the shop manual that flushing the system involves more than just draining the radiator, and the only thing I did was drain the radiator.

 

By draining and refilling without care to bleed you have trapped air in the system. If you can't find a DYI on the site take a look over at the s2kca site; Dave (xviper) is over there usually documenting things.

 

Thanks. I found an old thread here, in which Xviper gave a pretty useful description of an iterative process. I've done it twice now, and I'm getting heat out of the heater, and the car's not overheating any more. I'll let it cool one more time, go through the process again, and then take a drive.

 

I got into an accident which involved replacing the radiator (done by shop), on two different occasions, the Temp. gauge has gone up 5 bars! It happened ~ 3 months apart? Other than that, the car runs fine. Then i'm also trying to solve my air pump problem thats throwing a CEL.