Coolant on driver-side floor of My 85 GT5, how is this happening? I have at last a quart of coolant on the floor, hard to trace. I was under the impression the pipes run under the car. Can it be a heater hose issue?
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I don’t know about the GT5s, but the Ford-era Pantera used steel tubes that went through the shifter tunnel.
These went up along the driver side kick panel to the heater valve into the heater matrix.
Those tubes have a lot of complicated bends in them, so they are not easy to do from scratch at home, but I thought I saw that the vendors have prebent tubes.
But your car may be different. It would be a good upgrade to run the heater tubes outside of the cockpit under the car (maybe DeTomaso did it), but the coolant has to come into the heater matrix somehow, and that’s likely where your leak is.
Sometimes the heater valves leak too.
Depending on where you live (I.e. how much you use your heater), a temporary fix would be to just jumper the heater lines at the water pump, and flush the coolant out of the heater system with some compressed air (opening up your heater valve full blast, of course)
Then you could take your time to fix the coolant leak.
While you are in there, install some ballcock shut off valves in the system (engine bay) for racing!
Rocky
...It is the 6 Inch rubber hose that runs up to the Heater Core. That Hose RUBS against the SHARP Corner of the Accelerator Cable MOUNT, until a HOLE is Cut in it!!
This happened in My Pantera...flooded the Drivers Footwell!
Take care of it, The RUSTING of the Floor Pan, Starts Now!!
I guess hose to valve… on my car everything failed…
Here is what I did
Thank you for all the tips and ideas! Upon removing the kick panel I can see that the rubber hose is leaking. I will dig in deeper today to see the best way forward. Luckily this was caught quickly, and we dried up the carpet and surrounding area. Will post a few pix later...
Simply replace the rubber hose with two pieces of stainless braided hose. Simply fix and you won't burn your foot if it fails completely. PITA to work in that space, but once you fix it, no longer a problem. this is the fix Lance Nist would do on all the cars he worked on.