I purchased a 1994 Jeep Cherokee last week from a coworker who had bought it 10 years ago. He kept excellent maintenace records. His only problem was that it ate radiators.

After driving it home I noticed that the aftermarket temp gauge was 250. Holy smokes. I googled the problem which led me here to find lots of people had same problem. Lot of good suggestions on what to check but the cause seemed to be a mystery.

A long story short, after investigating the obvious and finding nothing wrong and with a few clues, I pulled hose off of expansion tank and found that the nozzle had never been drilled out after it was cast. A 3/16" drill bit fixed this and we are having cool runnings.

Hope this helps somebody else. Maybe it is a widespread factory defect.

 

Jeepers!
Someone came on here and actually fixed their own cooling system?

I hope this will become a growing trend.

 

Yeah, and they did it without 6 pages of postings.

 

Cool! No pun intended.
I like to see that you came on and did the search and found the problem before asking the same question over and over again.
Welcome to the forum.

 

Good job, good find. That's why it is so important to raise the hood and do some checking on things, like the bottle. In a normally functioning cooling system, coolant level should rise/fall a little with each motor heat/cool cycle. I presume "ate radiators" means the radiators were "splitting" thus leaking/losing coolant?

 

+1

BUT no one had figured this out since 1994 or at least in the last 10yrs? Unreal.

 

Thank you for the kind words.
how the previous radiators failed, previous owner thought they were under engineered with their plastic components. I don't know if they split or popped a hole

 

The only thing under engineered about the XJ rad is it's dinky size (sq. in. surface area to motor cid). Virtually all modern rads the past 20+ years are plastic tanks/aluminum core wide row design. Even the FSM says the plastic rad tanks are stronger than copper/brass but nothing is indestructible. Open cooling systems use a 2 way valve in the rad cap.....coolant/air must be allowed to escape (the rad) and coolant only must be allowed to return, thus no blockage allowed to/from the bottle.