You guessed it, today my car decided to catch on fire. It was tight. Everyone should be able to experience something this cool, especially when it happens to a car you have put such an insane amount of work into. My radiator or something was leaking coolant and my car overheated. I added coolant and water and then didn't tighten the cap, trying to minimize leakage due to pressure build up. I then drove about 45 minutes on the freeway, and after seeing that my car wasn't starting to heat, I smoked a couple people, embarrassed a 1.8T, and came to the stop by my house. As I was turning away from the stop, a large cloud of coolant smoke came out from under my hood. I continued to roll for about 2 blocks before I started to smell something far too acrid to be just coolant. By now, people were starting to look and clouds of black grey smoke were starting to pour out from the sides of my hood, and my engine was barely running. It died as I turned on the street to my house, and then the hood began to blister and swell up, a bulge of about 2 inches. I hit the e brake, hopped my ass out of the car and popped the hood, slightly burning my hand. I couldn't even see my fucking engine, all I saw was orange flames. I then dropped the hood, ran back into the car, grabbed the gallon of water that I bought in case my car continued to overheat, and dunked my whole engine. My hood was still on fire, so I dropped it, got my other gallon, and dunked it too. One of my neighbors was standing on his lawn with his mouth hanging open as I did all this shit with a quickness. His punk ass went inside when I started pushing the car down the street to my house. Damn was I ever glad I had that water sitting there on the passenger seat...although I do have a fire extinguisher in the back anyway. Here are the morals of this story:
1) ALWAYS carry a fire extinguisher
2) Coolant is flammable!!
3) Don't leave the radiator cap loose if you have a hot turbo header
4) Turbos add a lot of heat. If you can't protect EVERYTHING from the heat, get it out of the engine bay, which is what I am going to do now (evo style hood scoop) Also, it really helps if you don't have such a huge header like me, and also stainless steel doesn't conduct as much heat.
Basically my theory on how this happened is that the coolant spilled onto the hot manifold, caught on fire, and then set everything else on fire, because after driving fast with the A/C on for 45 minutes, everything was very hot already. The A/C turns on the cooling fans and they push air right across the manifold and turbo and then blow it on all the shit that caught on fire. I am going to need new wiring for the distributor, new plug wires, a bunch of new hoses and other wires, new clutch and speedo cables, a new hood, a new radiator, etc etc. Even my emissions control box is all melted, and all kinds of shit on the firewall (how appropriate) is all fucked up. I'm not even stressing though, I am going to buy sean's ecm conversion, put on a large quantity of new performance parts, and be flossin an evo style hoodscoop, all fairly soon. I just put in the walbro pump, and I modified an AEBS aftermarket type r manifold to fit. Alright you guys, peace, and keep the sleepers out on the streets
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Originally Posted by Accordtheory
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