Clean the area as best you can, lots of water should do it and it won't hurt anything. Get one of these start the car and find the leak, it's the only way.

 

better to blow out a freeze plug than put a hole in the block from pressure. mostly the case in intake manifolds though.

 

Coolant leak detector dye, get some, this should help narrow down the search pretty quickly. It would very well could be the headgasket. Headstuds, a new gasket, nothing will help you from blowing a headgasket when your car overheats and your head warps. I'm not saying that is what happened, but I am saying that it could have. You could have just burned through part of it that seals around the coolant passage to the edge of the motor or warped your head a tiny bit. I've never had a freeze plug issue so can't comment on that but I have had oil leak from the very edge of a passage out the side of the block.

 

if it was that freeze plug I would think the coolant would drip around it, not in it. Seems like it splashed there to me. Is that above an axle, then it might be that plug

 

Before I fixed my leak, one of my mechanic friends said he had a tool to pressurize the radiator. He said doing that would show where it was leaking from.mayb you could rent one from the parts store.If one of the freeze plugs was bad I think oil would come out of it not coolant? it wouldn't hurt to remove the 2 coolant lines on the tb to double check and make sure there's not a small crack in one of the lines. It's not hard to remove. Other than that, I have no clue where you would be leaking coolant from. If it was a headgasket you car would run weird and have white smoke out your exhaust from burring coolant.

 

Well, I found the actual culprit. I cleaned the whole thing out to start from scratch. Fired it up and waited until I saw a few drips. Stuck a mirror down there and looked around (That mirror was a good idea; don't know why I didn't think of it sooner). There's a rubber line that runs from the water pump hard line to the throttle body... the clamp around it is corroded and must have punctured the line because that's where the drips were coming from. POS. Now I get to replace that... should be a lot of fun.

 

i highly doubt that is the freeze plug! Do you have a stock bottom end?!?!

 

sounds a bit easier then a freeze plug so thats a good thing, and good call by the guys that suggested that what it was.


mike

 

I see the freeze plug there, but too far in for some reason. is this a built block?

 

you didn't read my post till now?!