So, I got my BF's back, bail him out of jail with the last cash to my name, and lo and behold, find out that despite the $700k house and $1500 suits, he's dead broke. $*&)#(&%_@ Finally hustle up some money and order the coolant pump for one of my cars thinking that's the last thing it needed. PITA to put in for no reason - why use those squeeze clamps when there's no room to squeeze them? What should be a 30m job takes an hour and a half. Get it all back together, turn it on, and the pump is working. Coolant swirling in the bottle; looks good; take it for a spin, the CEL is now off. Dang, if it doesn't start overheating. Monitoring the coolant temp with my ScanGauge and it just keeps climbing, up to 236 before I can get back home. I'm guessing the thermostat is stuck? Can y'all think of anything else? I clamped off the hose when I swapped the pump in and only lost a few tablespoons of fluid - could it still have air in the lines keeping it from cooling? The other coolant bottle off the radiator was empty so I put coolant in it; didn't open the radiator since it was still warm. Drove again and it looks like some coolant transferred from the bottle, maybe an inch, but it still got hot just the same. I'll let it cool off and look in the radiator. It wasn't getting hot like that before I did this. However, I remember one of my cars, the temp went up to 220 when I first started driving it, then went back to around 192 and stayed there. Not sure if it was this one. From a brief read here, it looks like the thermostat is a PITA to replace as well. Would like to confirm that's the problem. Guess I should have felt the hoses, but it was getting dark outside and I gotta walk the dog still.
As usual, turns out that I caused the problem. The coolant had leaked out. I had removed the driver's side radiator hose for some reason, and used pliers to break the hose loose from the outlet tube. Well, these radiators are made from aluminum foil and the outlet tube bent slightly so that it's not quite round, now it's leaking around that hose. *(#&*$_ I've pulled a lot of radiator hoses in my time and never had one do that.
OK. I got the leak fixed. I had to reset that hose clamp. So little space to work that it's another PITA. Probably better for someone with tiny hands. I'm thinking someone had the hose clamp off before. It's the type that you squeeze together and a tab on one side pushes through a slot and locks it open. That tab was pointing towards the drivers side, which allowed no room to get to the tab and push it up out of the slot. The first time, I'd just squeezed it over and over until it worked loose, but that seems to have let the bottom of the clamp slip out of place and not provide a good seal. I took it off and turned it around so that the tab faced the other way, and that let me keep it lined up as I popped the tab. This car is now officially fixed. The first one of my 6 to be totally done. Replaced the HV battery, 12v battery, AC compressor/freon, injectors, and inverter pump. Runs great, stays cool, AC cold, no codes, 50+mpg. It's the best looking of the bunch, and the only one with a working touchscreen. It's also the one with the most miles, 209k. Previous owner kept it exceptionally clean. Got two more that are running. One has the orange triangle but no codes. I think it's the inverter pump - I don't see any circulation - so I got it ordered. The other one runs great but has a triangle as well and gives me an HV battery code. I replaced a bad cell and the buss bar, and that didn't fix it. Although it's a PITA, once I get the inverter pump in the other one and, hopefully, solved it's problems and don't have any DTCs, I'm going to swap HV batteries between the two to confirm that the DTC travels with the battery. If so, I'll assume its a bad battery ECU. I have a couple of HV batteries in my parts cars, but I don't know whether the ECUs are any good. The cars aren't worth buying new ECUs from Toyota, and I don't know of any way to test them, so buying one from a dismantler carries the same risk. ;-(
