Producing this epic took hours, days, weeks and months of reading, talking to DEX and cooling system experts and users, writing, rewriting and then starting the whole procedure over again. It has consumed more than 8 months of my life. (Yes, a lot more than it should have due to health problems.) Frankly, the difficulty was finding any one person who could factually layout the “whole” picture. I’ve not yet spoken to any single individual who is either able or willing to share it “all.” Certainly there are plenty of engineers at GM who could. But with class action lawsuits eminent, they’ll not speak to Mole, me, or any other independent automotive writer. There are also independent cooling system engineers, maybe past GM employees or venders, who could put most of the pieces together. But most of them are contracted up with the attorneys for the plaintiffs; they’ll not speak to me either.
The other major problem in sizing up the whole DEX corrosion, rust, sludge, low coolant level (sometimes right from the factory), incorrect radiator cap part and location on radiator tank, undersized overflow bottle design and incorrect placement, deteriorating intake manifold gasket thing is just that: a darn story about umpteen components and systems with counteracting, interrelated events, including service shops and vehicle owners not knowing exactly what services to perform, and all this taking place at the same time together, or not!