Maybe some years ago, you had your car radiator repaired. Not these days. Car radiator

repairs are not as simple as they used to be. Radiators used to be made of all aluminum which you can weld or braze. Most of the time if you found a leak in your radiator you could simply fix it. This is not usually the case with today’s cooling systems. Most of them are made of plastic sides with an aluminum core. The plastic ones are not repairable in general.

The Truth About Car Radiator Repairs

What you may have heard: “You can do a radiator fix yourself, just solder your radiator fins or neck”… “Try some kind of adhesive or putty to stop the radiator leak” or “There is no way to fix radiators”.

The truth: Old classic car radiators used to be made completely of metal, typically brass or copper so you could simply use metal fillings to patch and repair them. You could just solder or braze them and this would restore them back to a fairly decent working condition.

New car radiators are made of at least two things. The first is aluminium. Automobile manufacturers use this as the “core” or, the part that does the heat exchange. Aluminium is much harder to repair than the brass or copper radiators that cars used to use. The cores of these radiators are thin so they cannot be welded and brazing can sometimes work, but it is hard to get the hole sealed.

Radiator Cap

The second thing that new car radiators use is plastic. They use plastic tanks on both sides of the core and they crimp the plastic tanks to the aluminium core. These crimped joints are sometimes prone to leakeage. While some radiator repair shops can re-crimp these joints they have to have special tools and equipment to do this. There is no way to fix these joints without special tools.

In addition to this, most cars and trucks today also have a transmission cooler built into the radiator. Any time you see red oily fluid mixed in with the coolant you have to suspect a transmission fluid leak into the coolant. The only good way to fix this is to replace the radiator.

Lim’s Auto Body is a full service auto body and mechanical repair shop locally owned and operated in Largo, Florida. For more information, go to our web site www.limsautobody.com or call (727) 422-3232.

Look how often things change with your cell phone. Seems like Apple comes up with a new phone every month. Look at how things have changed with your computer. There is always something new you need to learn. The same thing is true with auto repair.

Look back a couple of decades ago, and many guys had no problem handling the majority of auto repair issues that came up with their vehicle. A few standard tools, an auto repair manual, and some good hand cleaner for afterward was about all you needed. Today is much different as vehicles have anywhere between 30 and 100 microprocessor-controlled modules. The systems themselves are far more complex, requiring you to have experience and the proper diagnostic tools to find out what is wrong and resolve the issue.

These changes in auto repair have also made it necessary to choose your auto technician with care. Not every shop has kept up with the technological advances and is equipped to properly diagnose module issues and know how to proceed. What further complicates things is that a module can put off an error code that has multiple causes. It takes more than just knowing how to operate the diagnostic equipment to know when a faulty module is to blame.

If you are looking for an auto repair shop that recognizes that your vehicle is much like a computer on wheels with amazing features we only dreamed about just a few short years ago, give us a call at Lim’s Auto Body.

Lim’s Auto Body is a full service auto body and mechanical repair shop locally owned and operated in Largo, Florida. For more information, go to our web site www.limsautobody.com or call (727) 422-3232.