The lady is leaking

Hi guys
I came home recently and noticed some stains under the lady. Not good, never good at all. A quick test showed it is coolant. After a few days the stains went away only to return few days later which means she is not leaking continously. Hey, c´mon, she is not the youngest so please don´t make any comments about her age.
I tried to determine the source of the leak, must be somewhere between the cooler and the engine.
My question: what is usually the cause/ which gasket is it usually ?

Guess I will have to remove the coller to get to it, that itself seems not too difficult, what I am concerned about is getting the cooler back in place and venting it properly.

Or do I need to look for diapers for my lady, age around 41, weight around 330 kgs ?

Have a good time

Holger

Sounds like a typical water  pump seal failure. The water pump mechanical seal needs a differential pressure across the seal face which is provided by a spring and the back side of the seal is vented to atmosphere. On the front cover of the mechanical seal ( the piece where the 2 rad hoses attach) you'll find a small hole about 3 mm in diameter. That is the vent hole. When the mechanical seal starts to fail, coolant will drip out that hole. A lot of mechanics refer to that hole as the "telltale hole".
Mechanical seals can be serviced although small seals like the KZ mechanical seal being the size that it is, usually gets replaced with a new one. At some point down the road, replacements will be hard to find. In the nuclear plant we used to lap the Stellite faces ( the fixed seal face) and polish the carbon faces( the rotating element face) to renew. I could usually refurbish a mechanical seal in about 10 minutes. A fairly common job for a millwright to do. The seals I'm referring to here would be mostly water pump seals.

As a side bar story- In our nuclear power generating plants, our generators which were 450 megawatt generators, had a generator rotor that was 10 feet in diameter, 28 feet long and weighed 220 tonnes. It road on 2 plain bearings and spun at 1800 rpm. At each end of the generator were mechanical seals which had a diameter of 42 inches. In order to minimize windage inside the generator, a hydrogen gas was used and the mechanical seals kept the hydrogen inside the generator. A failed mechanical seal would allow the hydrogen to escape and hydrogen is highly flammable.
That mechanical seal weighed about 2000 lbs. The rotating face was babbitt ( a type of lead) and we had to scrape the mechanical seal face by hand with carbide scrapers. A tedious job the would take literally 200 hours to do. The job usually spanned over a couple of days with as many as 8 millwrights working on that babbitt face. 

Kawboy, Interesting to read about those generator seals, but I’ve often wondered how the steam turbines are sealed at the shaft output end, given the very high pressure and temperature involved.

Kawboy, Interesting to read about those generator seals, but I’ve often wondered how the steam turbines are sealed at the shaft output end, given the very high pressure and temperature involved.

Labyrinth seals. The labyrinth gland creates a torturous path for steam leakage between the rotating shaft and the gland. By following this path, the steam drops in pressure and eventually condenses at which point the condensation is removed and returned with the condensate returning the the steam generator for reheating.
Man I had to dig deep in to the ol' noggin to bring this one back up. 
Here's a link that shows what a labyrinth seal looks like . Enjoy !  Siemens steam turbine labyrinth seals

For those who have never seen a leak in action...

dcarver220b wrote:

For those who have never seen a leak in action...

 

I swear Don, if you haven't recorded everything, it's because you ran out of video storage space. 
Thanks for sharing,
KB