Hi folks,

Thanks again for all the great advice on how to get my car apart and put it back together.

In my earlier posts, I had thought I had a transmission cooler leak, since my reservoir was really nasty, with opaque brown goo in it, and my hoses were oily and funky.

Well, I set up to change my radiator, and drained my engine block (after a lot of struggling and skinned knuckles). The coolant was ok-looking! In the pan underneath the car, I was seeing pretty healthy-looking green + orange (looks like the two kinds has been mixed at some point) iridescent liquid.

It drained really, really slow, even though I took the reservoir cap off. Weird thing, though - the reservoir never dropped. I drained the radiator, and the reservoir tank was still full.

What the heck?

I removed the reservoir hose at the radiator, and nothing came out. I looked inside the hose (carefully, since I thought something might JUMP out), and some brown stuff like mud was sitting in there. I removed the reservoir, poured it out, and removed the other end of the hose. Impacted brown gunk! Stretching the entire length of the hose!!! Turns out this is a 20-year-old Volvo OEM hose. Looked wonderful from the outside.

Any ideas what this was, guys? In the documentation I got from the previous owner, the transmission was replaced twice at the dealership - once in '99, and then in '00. The original was broken by a leaking radiator - but the Volvo guys didn't catch the leak the first time, so the second transmission was broken the same way. I figure a years-long transmission leak could have made some major gunk deposits in the cooling system. I think the hoses are from 2000, too, when the radiator was replaced (with a Blackstone, by the way).

When I took the transmission cooler lines off, the discharge was nice and reddish. I guess the problem was never my radiator, but I'm glad I changed it - I figure a lot of that brown mud is in my radiator, too.

Thanks for reading!

Ari