Okay today we’re going to be changing coolant on a 67 cummins engine and uh same process applies for the 5.9 as well this is really easy anyone even if you’re not mechanically inclined could do this at home yourself and save some money so as far as what you need we’ve got a 5 gallon bucket that’s what i use and a funnel you’re going to drain the radiator and
You’ll probably get about four maybe four and a half gallons out that way the cooling system holds about six gallons so unless you do a flush you won’t get all the coolant out but you’ll get most of it out and i will i will comment on when to do a flush and and some options for that in a minute uh but let’s take a look at the coolant first so for these trucks
You got to run a special kind of coolant this is the one that i use this is the only coolant that i’ve ever used in these trucks and it is the valvoline xerx g05 and i’ve got the concentrated version so you’re actually going to do a 50 50 mix with some water i like to use distilled water but there’s there’s other options i’m sure that purified water of any kind
Will be good enough but i personally like to use distilled so let’s get over here and get the hood popped and get this coolant drain in a while because it does take a while to drain so if you come under the driver’s side of your truck you’ll see at the bottom of the radiator there is this dial and this is what allows you to drain coolant from your radiator and
Most trucks you will simply twist to the left which i may actually need a set of pliers here because i’ve got mine fairly tight you may also need to pull outwards a little bit as well okay take two with this there it comes there goes your coolant that’s going to drain for a while so just have to be patient to facilitate drainage we will loosen or remove the
Radiator cap which in my case i’m just going to take it off have to be removed in order to refill if you haven’t changed your radiator cap in a while they are cheap and this is a good time to just swap that out mine’s pretty young maybe 15 20 000 miles on it that’s about it well that’s draining i can talk about flushing the radiator or flushing the cooling
System one thing you could do if you want a cheap flush you could take your garden hose after this is done draining go ahead and fill up your radiator you can even start the truck and run it for a while and then drain it out and that’s one way just to do a cheap flush another option is to go to the store and get one of those flush kits with the bottle which
You’ll mix with regular water in the radiator run the truck for 10 minutes that allows you to to uh flush out the heater core which is way back in the in the firewall there you could flush the heater core or the radiator now in my case i know my coolant’s pretty low miles and i know my radiator is pretty low miles this radiator only has got 15 000 miles maybe
20 000 miles on it so i’m not worried about any cooling system problems i’m just changing the coolant to get fresh coolant in the truck okay as you can see here for all intents and purposes this is done so i’m gonna go ahead and tighten this back down like so and it’ll probably go another half a turn here with a little bit of pliers but um if you loosen this when
You start the job and and you don’t see coolant come out it’s because there’s a little o-ring in inside of here that’s on the on the end of this dial and that’s that’s uh it’s gotten stuck so don’t keep twisting i think the best way to get it out may be to start the truck warm the truck up leave the radiator cap on and then open this and it should have a little
Bit of pressure enough to push out i had that happen to me once before and i made the mistake of twisting this thing all the way off and no coolant was coming out and next thing you know it blows out and the o-ring goes flying off over here somewhere and luckily i found it so that’s just one little tip now what i’m going to do um is i’m going to go up i have a
Interesting procedure that i that i use for filling the radiator okay so here’s how i fill the radiator first thing i do is i start with a little bit of water i’ll add about half a gallon of water and what i’m doing here i’m just going to make sure that the drain valve on the bottom of the radiator doesn’t leak so that if it does leak and we have to redrain it’s
Just water and i’m not seeing any leaks so we’ll add the rest of this let me check again real quick everything looks good so at that point i switched to coolant and the reason for that is that eventually this radiator is probably going to overflow well uh and it’s better to have that happen when you’re filling water than when you’re filling coolant it’s nicer
To get water everywhere than cooling everywhere so as we uh probably uh fast forward through this section but you get the idea i’m literally gonna add about two or two and a half gallons of this coolant and then i’m going to top it off with water okay we’re now at a point where we have overflown the radiator and it happened a little bit sooner than i thought
As you can see here that’s just water in the in the funnel so it is leaking a bit uh but we’re gonna go ahead and fire the truck up and see if we can get that level to drop a little bit we may not be able to without driving the truck but we’ll see so we’ll fire it up and and let it run for a couple of minutes also there is a breather here for coolant feel i never
Use it the 67 engine hazard the 5.9 does not you can loosen this this little nut or whatever on top here and basically get all the air out of the system that way the other way to do it is just to start it run it get the thermostat to open and then check your level and that’s what i usually do we already i’ve already seen a few air bubbles coming out so we’re just
Going to try and get this level to drop a little bit and we’ll probably take the truck so i just got back from a test drive got it up to operating temperature got the thermostat to open and everything uh cracked the radiator cap there was a little air bubble in there but uh coolant level was still right about at the top here uh started overflow even so didn’t have
To top this off but i did add about a gallon into overflow bottle worth of uh about a half a gallon of coolant and a half a gallon of distilled water so that’s really it trucks done uh no leaks so coming down here though we’ve got our old coolant it looks okay i’m not seeing any debris in there i’m not seeing any oil in there either it’s got like a red color to
It which you know uh has me scratching my head a little bit now i understand that when i got the truck i had red coolant in there but i did do a change with this yellow xerx coolant before and it ended up turning back to this color so not exactly sure if uh having a four four to one mixture or five to one mixture would really cause it to go right back to red or
If there’s something else going on truck did have a egr cooler which probably put that cooling under a little bit more stress than normal which we no longer have to worry about that so i’m not too worried about this coolant in fact i’m actually going to put it in these bottles over here and save it for an emergency so i hope you all enjoyed the video and found it
Helpful if you’re looking to do the job yourself i’ll see you all in the next one you can see we only used two and a half gallons of this of the g05 so two and a half gallons of that about two and a half gallons of that too and you can see we got a little less than five gallons out here so if you get three bottles of the coolant you’re good to go all right that’s it for me take care
Transcribed from video
Cummins coolant change By Outpost CTD
