Stupid TJ radiator
Admittedly I’ve slacked off on regularly checking our TJ’s cooling system this past year. The Jeep is five and a half years old now, but it doesn’t even have 30k on the ticker yet, so I really hadn’t given the radiator much thought… yet.
This morning I noticed an odd small puddle of brownish water on the garage floor under the front of the TJ. It was dripping from the bottom passenger side of the fan shroud. I popped the hood and didn’t see any noticeable problems, but I didn’t have time to really check around since I had to leave for work.
So I went to look at it again tonight and the puddle had gotten a bit bigger. I checked around under the hood a bit closer and noticed some rusty looking gunk around the edge of the top cap on the radiator… I pull the cap off the filler neck and instantly smell… rust. The whole inside of the radiator is fully of rusty water. And the fluid level is low too (no doubt due to the leaking).
Guess I know what my next project on the TJ is going to be… A CSF radiator.
3 Comments so far
Leave a reply
I’m going to be right there with you. I’ll be putting CSF #2 in the XJ this weekend. The original CSF didn’t fail, it works great. But somehow my fan clutch head-butted my radiator, so now I have a small leak.
Jason,
Is this the same CSF that does a lot of import radiators? I am putting a rad in the XJ really soon, like you found a puddle and rusty H2O. I have a GDI 3 Core that a guy on the forum had for sale that hopefully he will ship. What do you think is better?
Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s the same CSF. I’ve heard some not so good stuff about GDI in the past few years, lots of quality control issues it seems. CSF has replaced GDI as “the one to get”.