Hello David:

Please pass this to John and tell him that thank hime for his advices.



Hello everyone:

I just wanted to give you an update on the Morgan, and to thank you all for the good answers and tips.

Today I took my afternoon off and spent some hours with the mechanic. We thought that the radiator was leaking since it was steaming, so we took it to a radiator shop, they checked it out and it was not leaking. It seems that the car had condensation between the radiator and the frame or grill, which was new (after reinstalling it, the steam went away.

After that we put the the car on 4 jack stands, and we worked on the timing, having in consideration all the advices that I got from John via David.


After looking the flywheel underneath, we found out that someone did a mark in the past, probably it was done by the previous owner or his mechanic when they rebuilt the engine at some point, since it does not look like a mark made from the factory. Then we removed the spark plug number 1 and the mechanic looked into the cylinder while I was turning the flywheel very slow to make sure that the mark was ok and the piston number 1 was at the top. We used the “ timing light gun" to doble check. Everything looked fine, so after a little timing adjustment, (since it was not so off), I went for a short ride.

Unfortunately the temperature issue was still there, and after 5 minutes going around the block the car started overheating again. So, back to the shop to start measuring the temperature of the block, radiator hoses, etc (with a laser gun). Again the dashboard instrument was very accurate and I turned the car off just before it reached 100 C.

BUT there were some findings. The temperature of the hose (Top - right side of the block) coming from radiator was at 105 C, and the temperature of the hose (down-left side of the block) was much more colder at 65 C. Obviously the water was not flowing well, which is very surprising, since the radiator was rebuilt by an experienced guy quite recently and never gave me a problem……

The other finding was that the radiator was at 105 at one spot, and 1 inch right, close to the frame, was at 85, which makes us think that the water was not flowing very well.

It was getting late so we decided to leave some tests for tomorrow, and so far this is the plan for tomorrow (please feel free to comment or add some ideas)


1) We are going to check if the overflow pipe inside of the radiator is not clogged since with the cap on, the system needs to be able to release some pressure (that is my understanding of the thermo-syphon principle)
2) We are going to disconnect the hose at the bottom of the radiator, close with a hand, fill the radiator with water, and then take the hand off to see if the radiator empties in a few seconds, if it doesn’t very fast is because, somewhere it is clogged (we might take it out again for this test)
3) We will remove the hoses from the block, and pour water with a hose on the right side to see how it flows, just to make sure that there is nothing clogging inside the engine.

Pre conclusions are:

If it is not the radiator and the block is not clogged. Then most probably the head gasket is bad and it is putting some pressure on the radiator. This would be very weird, since with the engine running hot, today we opened the radiator and looked inside with a flash light and there were no bubbles. Beyond that, I don’t have any other symptom of a head gasket problem. I hope it will be just the radiator clogged somewhere…..we will see it soon.

Well that was all, any comment will be very welcomed.

Best regards,

Gonzalo