Sadly I lack some of the toys. I told the wife the quickest way to check would be to simply unhook the heater hoses and to direct the flow to a catch bucket. Not quite ‘high tech’. But we had what seems like zero coolant flow to the front heater core and the rear heater core. Dodge uses some really strange plumbing on these dual cores. The pipes coming out of the engine where pretty hot!! But the pipe work at the heater cores themselves were stone cold.
But if we have flow? It should come out with a moderate force. If nothing comes out of the heater hoses? I’m guessing the water pump is either totally air bound (and unable to pump due to an air cavity) or broken. The pump looks to be plastic on a steel shaft.
We’ll spend some time tomorrow running some tests on it. I’m also planning on ‘renting’ another block tester just to check for exhaust gases in the coolant. This does seem like some really bad violent boil over- I had coolant issues with our old Bronco- It always started rough with issues due to coolant in the cylinders. I’m surprised that this 3.5 is still running smooth as silk during all this.
I’ll report back tomorrow once we spend some time on it. Was thinking about heading up when I got out of work today- But the saying is “Stay Dirty” (which I seem to manage better then Pig Pen), but not “Heat Stroke” as it was pushing 90 when I got off shift. Tomorrow isn’t going to be much better, but an early start we should beat the heat.
S-