Thread: 2004 GT2 Coolant Leak on Passenger Side

first time poster, long time driver. I've got a somewhat severe coolant leak on the passenger side of my vehicle. Yesterday my car gave me an overheating warning while driving, and when I pulled over a lot of coolant proceeded to leak out. I could see a trail going down the road that followed my car.

I'm not the most handy of people in terms of troubleshooting, so I had it towed to a Canadian Tire that was able to look at it. They told me that the piping on the sepentine belt tensioner was the cause, and have quoted $250 in labour, with a part price TBD tomorrow when they can find a distributor that carries the parts. I've been searching around and found many posts on this forum saying that this is likely caused by the elbows failing; I'm going to confirm when they call tomorrow morning by asking specifically which parts they are talking about replacing.

If it's the elbows, there's enough information around that I can do this on my own. The shop is about 6km (4mi) / 5minutes away from my house. If I top the rad off with coolant/water or even just water, should I be able to make my way home relatively fine?

Originally Posted by Fivefingerdeathpunch

Turn your heat on full blast and fill it with coolant and limp it home.

Would turning the heat on get the water pump going? I thought I read somewhere that the coolant system will only turn on at a certain temperature point. I was thinking of making the drive at night when it's ~45F out.

Fair enough. It might've been the coolant thermostat triggering something.

Will update tomorrow morning with the part quote.

Just received my total quote. $450 with part and labour. $85 of which is a coolant flush. I'm going to not throw away money like that and just do it myself.

Picked up the elbows from NAPA today. At first they didn't think they'd carry it and pointed me to a dealer, but I searched their site with part no. 47065 (Dorman/HELP), and it came up with their own part BKP 6601736. Only $6!

Sounds good. I'll give that a try.

Originally Posted by BillBoost37

You do know..the part numbers for both dorman and napa are in the "common parts" thread?

I do now for some reason I wasn't finding any search results on Google, I'd only seen the GM part numbers up until I found the dorman one.

Having some trouble locating the radiator petcock... do I have to remove the skirt under the front bumper to get at it?

The petcock actually worked once we got better access to it. When tightening it we discovered that you could put a socket over it as well heh.

We ended up draining/rinsing through the rad til it was clear, and then pulling the front knock sensor/rinsing through, followed by one last rad flush. Topped the car up with the bottle of concentrated dexcool followed by the premix, ran it til we couldn't put anymore coolant in, and that was it.

The coolant that did come out was fairly clean. I had my block heater explode on me a few years back, so when it was replaced new coolant would've gone in.

Thanks for all your help guys!