My dad has a 2012 Chevy Volt, and he thought the car had a small coolant leak. He would notice that the overflow tank would be low and sometimes he could see coolant pooled on the top of the transmission. There’s a coolant housing attached to the head right above that location, so we figured maybe it was a bad gasket. We bought a new gasket and went to install it, only to find that the old gasket failed because the housing cracked.
The Repair
Update 4/29/2023: WARNING!!! JB Weld is not safe to use on engine coolant. The engine coolant seems to turn the JB Weld into goop and it made the part fail again. Don’t believe me? See this post.
We tried calling the local dealers for a replacement part, but they all said it would take about a week to get in. He needed the car to get back home, so we looked for a repair solution. We both felt that if we didn’t do some kind of a repair on the broken housing, then the new gasket would cave in and eventually leak too.
JB Weld is pretty good for doing repairs like this. I had tubes of JB KwikWeld and regular JB Weld. KwikWeld sets in 6min, cures in 3-6hrs, and withstands temps up to 230F. Regular JB Weld sets in 4-6hrs, cures in 15-24hrs, and withstands temps up to 550F. Considering that he needed the car ready for the following day, and we still had to do reassembly, we decided to go with the KwikWeld. KwikWeld has a lower temperature rating, but its temperature rating is still above the average coolant temperatures of 180-200F.
Conclusion
This was a good chance to see how well JB Weld works in a scenario like this. Overall, I was fairly happy with the repair; it was simple to do and quick. The KwikWeld felt hard enough for reassembly in about 1hr, and we took the car for a test drive 4hrs after that. The new gasket might have held up as-is, but I think repairing the housing was a good call in the long run. If it starts to leak again, then we’ll probably just get a new housing and gasket. Hopefully chevy redesigned the housing because it seems like this is a common failure. If the JB Weld repair fails down the road, I’ll be sure to come back and update.
-Dan
References
- JB Weld specs
- JB KwikWeld specs <–what we used
- Chevy Volt Coolant Leak Fix
- video of similar failure
- this guy just replaced the gasket though and claims to be okay 50K miles later
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