Hi everyone, So i been working on my prius for the past 2 weeks. It was overheating and shakes when u stop and when u slowly accelerate. It seems like the engine wants to jump out. last week I've replaced the water pump, thermostat, coolant sensor, Spark plugs, coil, Cleaned the intake manifold and it's pipe. The overheating has been fixed except for the shaking until i replaced the fuel injectors. Seems to be going well until i forgot to tighten the coolant cap! It was late at night when my temperature was flashing and checked engine light came on. I was in a neighborhood where you really didn't want to pull over so i kept driving until i found a safer place. My question is do you think i ruined the water pump by driving it while it was overheating? Now the high temperature keeps coming back after refilling the coolant and the coolant reservoir is boiling hot. I'm not getting a pump code. I've seen P0117 which bud the coolant sensor but i've just also replaced that. What do u guys think the problem is.
Have you checked to see whether you have a bad headgasket? That seems to be one of the more common problems with Gen 3 cars, especially with overheating.
I'm surprised it running. Overheating the engine is never good. You "might" get lucky and and only the headgasket is blown. The head could be warped, and cylinders scored.
I think the million dollar question is... besides the leaving the cap off incident, were you ever loosing coolant? It sounds like a head-gasket, but if the coolant level never drops then there may be a glimmer of hope that you did just ruin the water pump, which has a plastic piece that can get cracked, or put an air pocket in the cooling system or something. How far did you drive with the light on?
i did lose coolant prior. I'm also thinking head gasket now. I tried removing the o ring from the cap and that was a lot better. I'd still see the temp light but goes away quickly. I'm thinking i'm not putting the coolant and bleeding it right. When i bleed am i suppose to do both engine and inverter at the same time? i've only been doing the engine by itself.
That's a fairly weak design open deck engine setup anyway and you're really putting it to the test I guess mine wouldn't have stood up to it it didn't number two piston tried to roll around in the block and it's bore broke the rod around 220 k oil changes were in effect things were good Head gasket blew first and then the number 2 small end of the rod broke. The engine would still reciprocate without making a huge racket obviously it was running completely out of balance and I didn't know much of this until the engine was pulled and I could see the damage so I replaced the engine obviously and with a low mileage transmission MG1 and 2 also
I think it's your head-gasket and at this point I would be pretty concerned about the rest of the engine since it's been driven over-temp. Removing the O-ring is putting a band-aid on a broken arm.
So i just came back from autozone and did the combustion leak test and it doesn't indicate that the head gasket is blown. i don't know how accurate those are but i'm pretty happy now.
Was that the one with the bottle of solution drawing up coolant to check for exhaust gas presence? If that comes back negative, it indicates you don't have exhaust gas leaking past the head gasket. Still, the majority of failures seem to be coolant leaking past head gasket into a cylinder, typically cylinder one and/or two. The head gasket failure tends to be at the wall between those 2 cylinders. Boroscope inspection of the cylinder can help check for coolant leaks into cylinders. And for any and all failure routes (IIRC there's eight?): leak-down test.
Oh geez.. Was not aware there was 2 and 4 under illusions. It was always reservoir and drain(1-3). i think this is the reason why i'm going through my second pump in a.month! i'm not bleeding it right.
I believe for the Prius, you won't have exhaust gases in the coolant. Because it doesn't fail that way. It fails from too much back pressure so coolant leak INTO the cylinder. So that test ONLY tells you there are no exhaust gases in the coolant. Do Post #12... You may get lucky and ONLY have a blown head gasket. But over heating the engine???? Count on warped head and scored cylinder walls and melted piston rings...
