Yesterday, radiator + traffic jam = boom!
the plastic part where the top hose fits to blew away from the radiator and broke off quite a section of the top plastic part too, which looked like this.
Not so good, so i rang my good friend, who does banger racing, and 15 minutes later i was at his yard scavenging through whats next to go on the track for radiators, mondeos, no good, i needed top hose left bottom hose right but they are top hose right bottom hose left so thats those out of the question, granada ones looked to be an all out bastard to remove and were a bit narrow really, so that only left one option, a rover coupe, so i asked him, does it have the k series engine, or the decent honda one, reply was honda, a fellow jap lump, pipework was the right way round, oh but wait, this is a sealed radiator as such, with no filler cap on top of it like the 5 has, so he said, well just take the rover header tank with you and plumb that into it as well , so thats exactly what i did!
Temporarily repaired, does it look sh!t, yes, is it a bodge, yes, is everything held in with cable ties, yes, is it the only mk1 mx5 to now have 2 header tanks, yes, but, most importantly, does it leak, no, which is all that matters!
So hopefully the correct radiator will arrive early next week, although the first job once i remove the rover one will be to pressure wash the engine bay to get rid of the total rusty mess that has been caused by it going pop, it looks totally disgusting!