Too busy to do much lately but drive the Rusty Frog, working on addressing rust issues currently. This is the first morning in NW Missouri with "frost on the pumpkin" (34 degrees this morning) and I am pleasantly surprised by how quickly the car gets to temp and how much heat I am getting. Definitely better than the old Prizm and my rear defrost worked well also .
Chris
Psalm 37:4 "Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart"
In remembrance of my friend ARCHINSTL:
T4WD augury? "Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' Let us go and make our visit."
T.S. Eliot - "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"Now and then we had a hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates."
Mark Twain
My current Tercel (86 hatchback) has the best heater of any car I've ever owned - I'd challenge any 2016 car to a passenger cabin cookoff. After 3 minutes of driving, it's like having a hair dryer blasting at you from each vent.
the heater core gets all coked up with deposited. There are a few things you can try, isolate the heater by removing the hoses at the firewall, flush it out and fill it with white vinegar and let it soak. than back flush it. You should get out a lot of whitish scale. The hazard is if the metal is thin you will likely create a leak in the heater core, this you can plug with radiator stop leak. Replacing the core is a major operation, you have to pull out the center console, dash, heater control, ducts, etc and get down to the heater housing and pull it out and replace it.
Of course if the heater core is corroded nearly through, it would not have been long before it gave up anyway.
the other alternative that works pretty good is to use one of those flush guns that puts a high frequency pulsing stream of water into the heater core. several on the forum have bought them (requires a compressor to run them), but it allows you to vibrate and flush out radiators and heater cores without removing them. Again, if the core is marginal likely it will blow it out, but that means it needed to be replaced anyway. But it has saved me doing a lot of work to replace heater cores and radiators that were ruined by scale that could not be removed any other way. you are welcom to borrow mine if you want to drive out to get it.
The Professor wrote:Wow, I wish I knew what that felt like! My heater barely works, unless you're going on a multi-hour trip.
I think either my thermostat is toasted, or the heater core is mostly plugged...
I thought this was my case too. Upon further fidgeting around with sruff, this temp control tab wasn't moving as far as it should have been. I popped that wire off, moved it further right and put the wire back in. Now it's hotter than Satan's booty hole in my car.
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it is the grayish wire near the center of the picture, going diagonal to the right. upper end is connected to the silver lever are on the right end, and it pivots on the left end of the silver lever arm. the end of control cable has a spring like wound end design to pop in and out of the metal clip that holds it making adjustment easy. You pop it out, adjust control panel and lever arm to correct position and pop the wire end back into the clip.
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