I need to drain my coolant and put in water wetter for an upcoming track day. My mechanic said that to completely drain the system I need to remove the radiators (not interested). Has anyone simply drained most of the coolant and added water wetter? If so, how was it done, and what effect did it have on engine temps?

-- john milotzky (jmilotzky@wi.rr.com), July 18, 2002

Answers

I'm not sure how to drain the coolant, but I was told by my dealer in houston that Cagiva USA said that water wetter voids the warranty. You might want to check with MV or cagiva to verify this.

Cheers

-- colin asekun (CAsekun@msn.com), July 18, 2002.

I siphoned a bit (maybe 1/3) of the original coolant from the reserve tank (by the ignition) and added some Waterwetter. I haven’t notice much of a different. 2 or 3 degrees if at all.

-- Allan Gibbs (Phoenix, Arizona) (Agibbs996@aol.com), July 18, 2002.

John,

per a previous post:

I needed to drain and flush my radiators ('02 F4S)for a track day. I wished to avoid the "radiator removal" version of this bit of work. Call my service guy and they told me of a hexbolt low on the side of the water pump. It has a copper crush washer beneath it. It is the ONLY one with a washer. I used that to drain the coolant. I drained 3x and flushed 2x and had most of the coolant gone, though the last flush still had a tinge of blue from the coolant. I found that squeezing the rubber hose on the left side between the two radiators helped in evacuating air from the system as well as a short run of the engine between flushes. Good wenching...

Scot

ps I have no knowledge regarding the warrenty issue...She does seem to run a bit cooler high 160's to low 170's

-- Scot Hennon (smhennon@gte.net), July 18, 2002.

160 to 170! Sha! This is Celsius then right? In Arizona Allan and I are seeing the high side of 220 F...

I don't know about water wetter, but my dealer sold me 2 bottles of engine ice which I have used with good results in my R1. However, once I learned that in order to fully evacuate all coolant from the system you need to remove the radiators, I wasn't so eager to make the change. I may still try to do what the above post says about draining and flushing a bunch of times, but I'm pretty sure that's still going to leave quite a bit of water in the system (maybe not really a big deal).

Anyway, I haven't done it yet but I was meaning to, so I don't have any results to give you with engine ice.

-- Andy Ruhl (quadreverb@yahoo.com), July 18, 2002.