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Well, the season is over…hope everyone had fun! Weather is getting cold and its gonna be chilly in the metro area starting tonight!
Remember to drain the water out of your radiators! Nobody wants a cracked cylinder!
newbie questions…
1. What is best technique to drain coolant?
2. For fall/winter karting on warm days, is it best to drain
coolant for the sub-freezing temps and just refill as needed
for those warm track days, or is running antifreeze
during this time of year acceptable?LN
Shockwave/LeopardLarry
Take the rad cap off. Pull the bottom hose from your rad and drain from there. You can also pull the lower hose from the engine if you want. Leave the hose off after draining so that if some water that is left in does freeze, it has some where to expand into, not break expensive parts.
Many guys do run anti-freeze in winter. Some tracks won’t allow it in any weather, some do. Check with the track you intend to practice. In general, most racing series do not allow anti-freeze in the coolant during race weekends.
On our karts, we are just in the habit of draining and filling coolant from now until spring.
Larry,
Absolutely no glycol based coolant / antifreeze products in your kart motor. Just drain the water after each day.
We always put a tag on the radiator cao stating “NO WATER” so you don’t try to run it dry.
@Rick Schmidt wrote:
We always put a tag on the radiator cao stating “NO WATER” so you don’t try to run it dry.
For those that don’t look at the radiator cap i put a piece of tape on the mychron saying the same thing; redundant system…
If using the drain/refill method thru the winter,
is it OK to put the drained fluid back in the system
for reuse or should new fluid aways be used?@Larry Natzke wrote:
If using the drain/refill method thru the winter,
is it OK to put the drained fluid back in the system
for reuse or should new fluid aways be used?Reusing water is fine, although capturing all of it is nearly impossible… so you’ll need some fresh water too to supplement.
Little known fact about engine coolant….
The stuff you put in your car (ethylene glycol antifreeze, which most people refer to as coolant) doesn’t actually cool as well as straight up water. Its purpose is just that, antifreeze, it prevents the water from freezing.
Larry, Run pure distilled water in your radiator, and only that. If you mix antifreeze/water in your kart, you’ll actually reduce its capacity to reject the engine’s heat as opposed to running straight H20. I dont really see the point in running any antifreeze in your kart (since they’re used primarily in the warm months)…sure it saves the time of draining the radiator, but that only takes a couple minutes! You just gotta remember to do it!
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