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Old 20th October 2020, 07:27
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Mister Towed Mister Towed is offline
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I'm with Lucky, the symptoms suggest a failed head gasket. I had the same problem on my Midget - it ran fine for nearly 200 miles back from Goodwood in 2018 with the temperature gauge staying below half way, but started making odd noises, a bit like a slow running steam engine, with about fifteen miles to go.

I arrived home and turned the engine off and everything seemed fine, but a minute or so later about three litres of coolant gushed out of the expansion tank in big pulses.

Each time I took it out after that it did the same thing, it ran fine and the gauge said it was cool, but it would vomit coolant all over the road a minute after shutting down.

The coolant wasn't unusually sludgy and there was no 'mayonnaise' in the oil, but after checking everything else I decided that it must be engine gases over-pressurising the cooling system.

I whipped the head off and sure enough, there was a fine crack across the gasket on one cylinder. After a clean up of the mating surfaces and a new Payen gasket, I haven't had a problem since.

Good luck getting it sorted
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