Figured out why I was overheating.
 

Apparently the previous owner never changed the coolant.

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when you rebuild, pull all the freeze plugs and replace with these:
Brass Freeze Plugs Sets

the dude will put together whatever package you need and ships fast.

that includes the ones in the head! all of them are probably mostly corroded away by now and will be future frustrating failure points.

Yeah, pulling the motor for a rebuild, so it will be stripped down and hot tanked. Motor only had about 78K on it, and is an '00 (which I keep forgetting means the car is 10 years old).

ewww that's nasty. I was also surprised at how utterly disgusting my coolant was when I changed it after purchasing the car. Seems like some people think coolant is supposed to last the life the car or something?

well i'm kinda one of those lazy types too. coolant isn't an easy garage task. you need buckets and hoses and hazardous waste disposal sites and it's a pain.

the only reason I was able to flush out my cooling system this last time was because it puked all the coolant (and several subsequent gallons of water) between my work and home. there was no coolant left.

That's scary since my '08 lancer has 58,000 miles. I already want/need to do transmission flush, timing belt, and now I want to do the coolant flush as well. I don't want to be one of "those" car owners.

I was amazed at what a month or two of straight distilled water did the miata.

You can be lazy and not flush all your coolant completely.
You can simply drain the radiator then replace.
Just do it 1x/yr instead of every 2 years and it will be more than enough to keep the anti-corrosion stuff in the coolant in good shape.

Sorry to bring up an old thread, but I need some help. I am doing a complete engine build, and right now I cannot for the Love OF GOD get the rear plug out. I got all of them out except for that one, and I'm tempted to just jbweld it back up and call it a day. Anybody do this before?

Never mind......... don't ask.

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Wow I didn't realize there is a plug in the head... it looks like it is an absolute bitch to remove. Should I just risk it and not change it?

that's what mine looked like. remove it and replace it.

dont forget to coat the hole and plug in a super thin layer of indian head shellac

I'm one of those car owners... I definitely need to flush my '01 Audi A4's system. Thanks for reminding me. 160K FTW!!!

I can't even count the number of times I've replaced the coolant on my engine(s). I always seem to get a new leak when I work on something major :(.

I got a 94 engine with 156k miles, original timing belt, nothing ever touched except the oil, and it didnt look like that. Did you every add water wetter or something?

What I find strange why it is only the bottom area as if it had sludge or something thick inside and to make it more interesing is a perfect horizontal line...!?!

As if maybe it had some cheap additive which stayed at the bottom corroding during time. How did the coolant looked like on previous changes?

Since when you had the car?