The Radiator's ALL CRACKED up... I Guess We Should FIX it! ~ Part 3 ~ 1950's Caterpillar TraxCavator

The Art of Rebuilding a Radiator: A Hands-On Guide

As I began to disassemble the radiator, I realized that it was more complicated than I had anticipated. The holes were not aligned properly, and the gasket material needed to be carefully placed to ensure a tight seal. I decided to start with the holes, making sure to align them correctly to avoid any mistakes. "These guys didn't tell me," I said to myself, "these things should have been mentioned when they happen." Nevertheless, I continued with the task at hand, determined to get it right.

I started by finding the outside edge of the gasket and using a round ball peen hammer to tap it down gently. This process was essential in ensuring that the gasket was properly seated and would not move around while the radiator was in use. As I worked my way around the edges, I used a slightly larger ball peen hammer to push away any excess material. "I like to take the slightly bigger ball-peen hammer and work my way around the outside edge first," I explained. This technique allowed me to create a smooth surface for the gasket to adhere to.

Next, I turned my attention to the inside of the radiator tank, where I used a razor X-acto knife to cut the gasket material to shape. The corners were not sharp, so I opted to use a flat edge of the knife to make the cuts. "I usually run my finger along it to try and break off any little fuzzies, little chunks that are still attached," I said. This step was crucial in ensuring a smooth seal between the gasket and the radiator.

With the gasket material cut to shape, I moved on to the bolt holes, which were an essential part of the repair process. I removed the old bolts and replaced them with new ones, making sure to secure them properly. "I've decided to use permatex aviation formula gasket on the seals for the radiator," I said. This type of sealant was perfect for rough surfaces like this one.

As I reassembled the radiator, I applied a thin even coat of Permatex to both surfaces, making sure they were properly aligned before applying them together. The radiator was now ready to be put back into service, but I knew that there might still be some issues. "These bolts that we're holding the radiator together are in really rough shape," I said. "Some of the threads are just totally stripped, some of them they're just missing a bunch." My plan was to replace them with brand new bolts and lock washers.

The final stages of the repair involved adding new coolant hoses to the system. One hose was particularly tricky to install, but eventually, it was secured properly. With the radiator reassembled and the new hoses in place, I filled the tank with water to test its integrity. To my relief, there were no leaks, although I had overfilled the tank slightly.

As I inspected the radiator more closely, I noticed a hydraulic leak coming from one of the fuel joints on the hydraulic pump. "I need to figure out what seal that is to replace it," I said. If anyone knew what type of seal was used in this application, please let me know in the comments or send me an email.

The final test was to check the radiator's performance and ensure that it was cooling properly. To my satisfaction, it was doing its job perfectly, staying cold as can be. Despite some challenges along the way, I was proud of what I had accomplished. "There'll be a lot more to come with Old Red pretty soon," I said, hinting at future projects in the making.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh yeah baby i don't want to run it too long right now because it has a massive coolant leak and i just wanted to see if it operated i want to see if the motor ran properly so now that i have the motor runs and drives all i really need to do is fix the coolant leak and go from there with other issues hmm here's the grill for the front of the caterpillar and i've already taken off this uh cover here that exposes this pump but i'm gonna pull the grill off so it's got bolts here here and here and then a few along here looks like it's missing a couple here so we're gonna pull this off and i think i can just tip it forward so i think i can tip it forward and and let it rest against this and i'll put a board below it to catch it in case it does fall should be good and i don't think the radiator itself is bolted to the grill so we should be good there too i guess we'll find out thank god for the right tool a little bit of a mouse nest right there but then there is the radiator leverage baby it's what built all the early civilizations all right so this is the pan that basically is the guard for the front of the machine i'm going to drop it down so i can get access to the bottom of the radiator a little bit easier so as you can imagine there are a lot of like broken bolts that never got taken out or dealt with because they just want to slam it together so when i first started messing with the coolant i basically took this valve out and was able to get it out and clean it all up and put it back in but i couldn't get that shut off or basically there's a shutoff valve right there and it was rounded over for many years and i couldn't get anything on it because there's just no room to work and so i'm going to deal with that as well there's two bolts that should be here and there and they're both missing on that side so on this side there's one bolt missing here and then this one's so loose i can just move with my fingers and the bottom of the radiator is this yellow painted area and honestly it doesn't look that bad looks to me like there's a gasket right here underneath this bar with all these bolts on it that probably goes all the way around the bottom of where the core meets the frame so this is considered the radiator core it's what coolant flows through and as air flows across the cooling fins it removes the heat from the engine essentially and so these go bad they have problems they get they get dinged up but i think we're going to tear a little further into the radiator and i don't i am optimistic here i am optimistic that a gasket and maybe some rtv or something would be uh all this baby needs hoping i don't have to take it out luckily though sitting right there is another radiator don't know how good it is either but i've got it i think this is just a gasket to keep dust in this area so i think i can safely take that off fact that the water came out of right here worries me so now we can see a little closer so this is the bottom of the radiator there is a lot of crud in there but it's really not too bad and then this is the bottom of the actual core i'm wondering if there's a leak right here along the bottom edge have to clean it up first the gasket itself doesn't look too bad definitely looks like there's a something going on right around there so at some point somebody has had this apart and they've had to fix it and so one of the repairs that can be done is an older machinery i've seen this before is they'll solder certain veins closed because they have a leak somewhere up along the top and instead of trying to find a leak there they just close the whole vein and so there's one two three here and over here there's one two three four five closed so worst case scenario i find that i have them in a situation like that i could close one of the veins now i think to do it properly i'd probably have to take the top off as well and close it both up and down so there's no water going into it on either side i can probably get away with just doing it on one side but i don't like to cut corners if i can avoid it because usually when i cut corners it bites me and i end up doing it again so so here's the bottom of the radiator and it looks fine until you start looking at the edges of the veins cracked open all along here just on the bottom row what i think happened a lot of the mounting bolts for this radiator and the radiator cover and the grill and the everything was just barely bolted together and i think the radiator was allowed to just shake and i think that it shook enough that it cracked all of these along the road there's just too many for it to be an accident i mean we're talking from about right there all the way to there here all the way to here and i don't think it went any further because they'd already added some solder on these ones down here so i think that's actually a pretty good problem i think i'm going to fix it up solder them up and go from there so the goal here is to make this metal shiny that's how clean we need it i just spent some time straightening open and folding all of the veins back to about straight so that they will be right where i want them to be once i solder but also so that they can you know not restrict cooling flow once we go to actually put this back in and use it and so a lot of them had been bent over and kind of mangled a little bit so but this will also get in those folds out of the way allows me to get in there one more time with the wire brush and get the last little bit of dirt and corrosion off of this metal before we start prepping it for uh for the solder all the ones with dashes are ones that have cracks basically on this bottom row the middle row is pretty dang good other than right there there might be a small little pin hole that i might put some solder in the ones with the dots so there's like four here with dots these have lines and then all the middle have dots and then these have lines so the ones with lines are ones i'm fairly certain if not completely positive there's a crack the ones with dots are it's kind of a question mark it might be totally fine and so honestly while i'm in here i'm probably just going to go ahead and solder around every vein on this this whole row and every vein along the top row and then this spot i don't want to have to tear it apart and do it again so might as well do it all once so this is muriatic acid and we're going to use it to clean and wipe down the top of this very very corrosive very very dangerous stuff if not used properly all right so we are going to solder up the radiator using uh just this map gas torch that i have and a soldering tip on it this soldering tip has not been uh used yet so we've got to clean up any debris or anything on it and we're gonna tin it so basically it's you essentially cover it with with solder so that it basically has the ability to release it when it's onto the other part and so we've got this knocker road soldering paste basically it's flux and you want flux that contains zinc chloride and so i've got this old school can of it and then i've got this much much newer uh actual liquid flux and we'll see what works well but we've got keister acid core solder i heard works very well and i just happen to have some so i have such an area to cover i think it'll be easier without this tip okay here's where i'm at so basically i've flowed the flux pretty much through all of them i haven't cleaned this area of the flux up yet about to do that and then i've got a little bit runoff on the edge of the where the gasket's going to go so i'll just heat that and wipe it but i think that this is gonna work i truly think we've got a good bond all the way through i've done multiple layers and fluxed the heck out of it and so we'll see much cleaner all right now i got pretty much everything filled in that i want i'm just gonna clean up the wire brush and go from there so the bottom of the radiator is fully soldered cleaned up this is a brass radiator so that's why you see the goldish color around the rim but i pretty much flowed solder around each and every single tube i figured while i was in there i might as well do you ever have those moments in life when every single part of your intelligence is telling you to go that one step further and do that one next step so that when you get this finished you will basically have confidence in whatever it is that you've been doing well right here is that situation for me at this moment this side is done i don't know if there's a leak on the top or not because this is the bottom and i really every part of my wanting to get past this part in the project is telling me just leave it alone leave it alone leave it alone but my intelligence is saying take it apart even if you have to make a new gasket just to see if you have any problems up there and so that's where i'm at i'm going to take it off and we'll find out if there's any issues on the top good well i'm a do gasket kind of figured that i'm sure i'm glad i listened to that smart intelligent side of me because see that fins cracked right there that one's cracked right there there here it's basically about like the other side so i'm gonna pretty much have to do the same thing twice and had i not opened this up and looked at the top i would have gotten it to the point where i could use it and then it would have leaked and i wouldn't have gotten it perfect and i would have wasted my time so so now we're gonna do this right we're gonna solder this side just like we did the other i went through and just real gently with this screwdriver straightened these fins out best i could and what that's going to do is it's going to allow better air flow through the radiator so that the cooling gets done more efficiently but more important than that to me at this moment is that i'm checking every single spot where there's a dent or a ding and trying to see if there's a leak in the actual tube the vein in there these fins themselves don't don't hold any any liquid it's the the three rows of of uh veins that do that the water flows up and down through and so in doing that i was able to really see every single dent in damage and find and so far i haven't found any spots where i think there's going to be a leak in the actual face of the tubes um like i thought they were going to be on the ends so i think we're in good shape we're going to flush it out a little bit more clean it up a little bit more and then make some gaskets and see how it goes so so so now i'm going to run a tap through each one of these holes so that i can make sure that the threads are clean and that the bolt will get a nice strong bond into the head of this get all the junk out of it from all the years of it not being uh taken care of so so if you're curious about this this is just a tap that i had and i had a nut and i just kind of tapped it on made sure it was uh nice and straight and then i clamped it in a vise and just soldered threw some flux in there and soldered right around it so that i can use a socket or a ratchet on this when i use this impact this impact has the ability to just snap this off like nothing and so i mean this is one of the highest rated most powerful battery impacts you can buy now right now i've only got it set to one and then i am very very very lightly feathering this trigger and feeling and watching for any movement and then i stop and then i do the rest with it with the ratchet wrench to avoid breaking this tap here in the in the top of the coolant tank and the reason i'm using the impact to make things quicker because i got a lot of these to do and i already did the other ones on the actual uh bottom coolant tank that's actually in the machine still just i did it just like this because there's 40 of these to do so anything you can do to make things go quicker smoother is always good well it can be sometimes it can be bad and when i pull it out sometimes it comes out just coated in like gunk from the bottom of that hole and so what i do is basically just hit it with some compressed air just to clean it off before i go putting it in the next one all right there's a little bit of roughness on this gasket surface so i'm just going to use a little lubricant here and just take the file across it real gently do i just made this gasket using the ballpeen method and so i'm going to show you how i did it on the other gasket that i need to make for the bottom of the radiator all right so this is the bottom of the radiator still installed in the machine i decided against taking it out if i could avoid it so we're going to clean this up and then we're going to get to creating the new gasket here right on the machine i don't have a shop back with me so i'm gonna do my best as a magnet trying to get all the little crap i spent most of yesterday failing to get this plug right here out this is a drain plug for the lower side of the coolant tank this is where you would drain all the coolant out there's a hole right below it that when you drain it it comes out well i tried everything i worked on this for probably five or six hours and just couldn't get it failure after failure of different trying different things and so i don't believe in failure i believe in obstacles in the way of success and so today i brought some better tools namely a little welder and i got the generator and so the plan is going to be to weld a nut onto it so that i've got something to grip onto and try and get it out when i first started i got it out or i got it moving a little bit with a pipe wrench but i could never get a good enough grip again and so somebody before me even before i messed this up had already been trying to do this and they gunked it up with all this like sealant crap and you know as a band-aid well i plan to flush this radiator once i get it all put back together and under use and so i want that plug out now i do have another entire radiator here and i could have just thrown that in there but i don't know the condition of it and so that's why i went to the trouble to repair the one that was on it but right down here is where this plug goes and this is the plug i'm trying to get out right now so essentially it's got you know a hex head what it did at one point and so the plan is once i get that one out is to put this one in and so we're gonna basically weld some a nut on the end of it and try and get it out that way uh all right we've got the nut on there let's see how we did well that try didn't work time to go again all right i got it out quite a few turns but i started mangling up the nut i put there we're gonna give a pipe wrench another shot now that i've got a little more to grip on to almost there i think we're there oh heck yes when you fail when you actually do fail and you don't succeed and you try hard and then you come back and you try again and you succeed like this you get this out whatever this is for you in your life it makes it so much sweeter it makes all the failure worth it every ounce of sweat every ounce of pain frustration anger the success makes every bit of that worth it so don't let your failures get you down learn from them and keep going all right so the new plug out of the other radiator it's going to go in there but this time it's going to be coated with anti-seize so that i don't have to deal with this again at least i hope not anyway all right so we're just going to pour a little water down the radiator not quite tight enough yeah so the grill mounts right here across the front and there's a broken bolt that i'm going to try and get out i think we got it bingo why is his name oh one two three four five six seven eight nine ten that hold the front grill on um there were only two or three i think there were two one there one here and then two in the back corner and one right here in the corner that was even holding the grille on so it was missing a few and so we're gonna go follow through all these holes with a tap just to kind of clear out and straighten out the threads if they're angled at all and go from there so and then i follow through with an air gun and i stick a rag over it so it's not blowing back in my face and basically grab whatever size bolts gonna go in there and just double check make sure it fits nice and all the way in no no stopping perfect now we'll do that to the rest of them so right behind the radiator there's a grease zerk on this uh u-joint and it's not wanting to take grease so the plan is to replace it it's a new grease zerk i have a collection of grease zerks that uh some came as a kit others have just collected over the years see if we can't find a good one there we go we got the gasket surface cleaned up as best we can and we're going to make a gasket for this so what i do is i try and cut it to about the right size and then you start with holes two two holes to begin with and i typically like to do four so in the corners is best so you take a ball peen hammer get different sizes i like the real small ones for the holes the bigger ones for the edges so you basically just tap around the edge of the hole and it will cut the gasket material to the exact size that you need in the exact spot you need it then we take a bolt with a washer on it thread that just snug it doesn't have to be tight you don't really want it tight you don't want to ruin the the material and you don't want to damage the surface that you're hitting either your goal here is to basically just break the gasket material along the edge of whatever it is that you need there to be a cut at whether it be a round cut right around the hole or be an edge cut right around along the edges all four corners ah shoot all right so i uh misaligned that slightly but this will be okay this hole here will be on the outside of the gasket and this hole here will be on the inside of the lower cavity why didn't you guys tell me come on you got to tell me these things when they happen so everything's the same you basically start with the holes to absolutely make sure i don't mess that up again go to this end and do this far corner so now we have the gasket in place and it's not going to move on us so i like to take the slightly bigger ballpeen hammer and work my way around the outside edge first you basically just take the round ball peen side and you just kind of find the outside edge and you slightly tap down at an angle kind of pushing away you work your way around any edges i kind of try and pull it tight side to side so that it's nice and flat sometimes you need a knife for instance right here there's a little raised section as you can see it's being cut just to the shape that we need right now just like that we've got the outside i usually run my finger along it to try and break off any little fuzzies little chunks they're still attached next i like to work my way along the inside so kind of take your finger find the edge start tapping and the only downside is is that the inside of this radiator tank is not very it's not very sharp the corners and so i think instead on this one i'm going to use a razor x-acto knife because i can take the blade of the knife and i can run the flat part deeper along the edge of the actual tank and get the gasket cut all right now what we'll do we'll do the bolt holes all right now we got them all take these bolts out and work our way around if you've done it right most of them will just pop right out and that is how i make a gasket the ball peen hammer an exacto knife and some gasket material and i have no idea what the cost for this gasket is or the get the gasket that goes on the top i i didn't even look because number one i'd have to figure out where to get it and then i'd have to get it wait for it and it's just much easier to have gasket material on hand and then they can make whatever gaskets i need and so that's what we did here so yeah now that we got that ready to rock and roll we're gonna start putting the radiator back together i've decided to use permatex aviation formula gasket on the seals for the radiator these are very good for rough surfaces like this so what you do is you basically apply a thin even coat to both surfaces now i apply it to the gasket now you let it set up for a couple of minutes and then you apply them together radiator reassembly time so these bolts that we're holding the radiator together are in really rough shape some of the threads are just totally stripped some of them they're just missing a bunch so my plan is to replace them with brand new bolts and brand new lock washers time for an upgrade hmm all right there's a broken bolt in one of the side panels for the radiator try and get that out that's how it's done um new coolant hose on this one too i should have put this on earlier we got this uh radiator installed let's see if it holds water without leaking well there's a leak but only because i filled it up with water too far so it was just overflowing over the top don't actually have a leak but it is good to know i've got it all the way full and i haven't seen any leaks i'm going to dry this up and then keep an eye on it no leaks hydraulic leak right where the fuel joints go into the hydraulic pump and so i need to figure out what seal that is to replace it so if you know what seal that is i'd love to know let me know in the comments or send me an email the other thing is this what is this it like it feels it looks like it should be bolted in it's got some sort of a fitting here yeah so if you know what that thing is definitely let me know i'd like to figure it out because it doesn't look right and i mean it's loose and there's a couple holes in it plus this fitting so i'd like to figure that out all in all though she cools perfectly stays as cold as can be well i hope you guys have enjoyed the process enjoyed the progress and there'll be a lot more to come with old red pretty soon we're gonna move this baby out of here\n"