Posted by John Eickhof on Monday, January 05, 2004 at 1:02AM :
Why the M37 I bought at an auction in Cheyenne Wyoming a couple summers ago had only 3691 miles on it since 1952...Digger Dan and I went to replace what I thought was a leaky frost plug located behind the starter today...got the starter off and found the block haas several 1" long cracks (not visible to the eye but when pressured they leak...the entire rear side of the block has been frozen at some point enough to expand the side wall enough so a weak point in it has been leaking...for a number of years! Most likely the truck was donated to Wyo State with very few miles on it and probably came from one of the states that do not know what a hard freeze or anti freeze is!! Thus it probably froze the first cool Wyoming winter that it spent without antifreeze!! I then suppose it started to leak and upon inspection by Wyo mechanics, it
was then probably mothballed because of the bad block...anyway, Digger had a freind come over to look at it...(specializes in block repair) he deemed we can probably repair it with some JB weld and if that does not work, then we will pull the engine so it can be laid on it's side and he will silver braze the cracks...So, it is drying and staying warm to-nite (our temp will dip to -7 to -10 tonite)in Digger's garage and we will apply the mending in the morning!! I will keep you posted of the results...plus, we installed a heater in it today too!! I am fabricating a nice compact defroster piece for it too!! If anyone has any other suggestions as to how to stop the leak (without using a radiator treatment) please post them!! Thanks!! Happy holidays!
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