What a wonderful coincidence! I was going to make a thread about this tonight anyway. The woman was insistent on helping me today so I told her she could clean the two coolant pipes, and scrape the old hardened gasket material off. The upper one (thermostat housing) she was working on while I was running a tap down the block in preparation for studding and she asks " what is this, a ball bearing" and I go "HUH!?" "This ball, is it a ball bearing?" Woman, a ball bearing is a ball bearing WTH you talking about? "There is a ball in this pipe" No dear, there is no ball I don't know what in God's name you are talking about but there is no ball. "There is a round ball I see inside this thing" Well now I'm annoyed this conversation was going on for at least two minutes so I stopped what I was doing walked over and to my absolute disbelief, a ball!!! She had this I told ya look on her face and I'm suuuuuuure I'm not going to hear the end of this for a few moon cycles but anyway...
The ball is inside the thermostat housing and it's held in there by some hard material but it's not cast iron. Perhaps just old gasket material? Should I try and dig it out? My question I was going to make a thread about is "Is that ball supposed to come out"? I'm guessing the corresponding hole in the block is smaller than the ball and the block is what the ball is supposed to engage as a check valve?
If someone gets back to me tonight before bed that it indeed should be able to come out of the housing I'll gladly dig it out quick and throw the micrometer on it and get a measurement.
OI82
