Hello all, Is the LT1's cooling system self bleeding? My temp gauge reads above the first line approching the second line anymore and the mechanic who installed my new engine told me it doesn't need manual bleeding, it will do it on it's own. Thanks for reading.

 

nope, you should see two bleeding screws around the water pump.
should be right under the throttle body.

 

You must bleed the air out of the system. There are two brass screw bleed valves near/on the upper hose between the engine and radiator.

 

one is on the thermostat housing, the other is right near it on one of the heater hoses

 

Shoebox has pictures of everything:

 

Oh thanks for the pics. One problem, I'm not exactly Mr. Goodwrench, so , Ok I open those screws, then what? wait for coolant to flow out as a sign all the air is purged?

 

lower part of this how to

http://shbox.com/1/4th_gen_tech2.html#radflush

 

Thanks for that page. A good read, but that portion where it says to protect the Royal Opti, has me scared. I just got a new one and this sounds liek a dealer job to me.

 

The Opti isn't as weak as some people think. When I changed my water pump coolant got all over mine and yet so far so good my Opti is still going,

 

yea, its more like it sucks if its bad cause changing it sucks, but its a fairly decent unit. the opti on my old Z was CAKED with dirt, oil and grime, and it ran awesome.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love the LT1. I love the low end punch that the LS engines don't have.Although I think I like it as a whole and not the sum of it's parts. If the Opti and this cooling system that was gonna change the world were so good , they'd be on the LS engines. I think to GM, it was like a haircut,looked good at the time, til they got their yearbook photo.

 

I won't defend the Opti, but I can tell you that the reason the the LS1 doesn't have the valuable "reverse flow" cooling system is because GM was sued for patent infringement by the inventor of Evans Coolant. They didn't drop it because it caused any problems, they dropped reverse flow cooling because they lost in court.

 

I never knew that.

It sure does explain why they dropped one of the best ideas in small block development since 1955.

Fortunately, it doesn't stop me personally from using the knowledge on future non-ltx builds.



Note to original poster:
Your mechanic is not technically incorrect. Your system will eventually purge it's air into the overflow tank. However, he may have given you the incorrect impression that this will happen relatively quickly.
Shortly after buying my first LT1 vehicle I had to replace all the hoses and I then spent the next few WEEKS opening the overflow tank and topping off the coolant.
It wasn't until after my system had finally purged itself that I discovered that there was a faster/better way.

 

How is reverse flow cooling better then normal cooling? I know the reverse flow has the advantage I just never really understood why.

 

reverse flow cools the heads first(engine heat is from the combustion chamber), therefor higher compression and/or more power can be acheived before detonation