81 Spider Heater Nightmare

[tedy]

I bought my Spider a while back and once I got it home, I went through the various systems to make sure the vehicle was safe to drive on the roads in So. Cal. I bought the car in Phoenix from someone who by profession was well "educated", but by what I saw, obviously not mechanically inclined. The cooling system was of great concern especially after reading many of the posts on the forum. I flushed the system, replaced all of the hoses, put in a new thermostat, removed the radiator and had it flushed and pressure checked, and checked the operation of the cooling fan. Because of our local weather, I was not to concerned with the heater/defroster, but the blower motor was very noisy. It's a pretty big job, but I finally got around to fixing the blower motor. I got the lower portion of the heater/defroster unit out and a little bit of cleaning and lubrication had it running like a champ. The removal of the portion of the unit containing the blower motor allowed me to observe the exposed surface of the heater core. I noticed the telltale signs of some small leaks (that greenish stain that occurs on copper). I decided to remove the heater and check the heater core. I have attached some pictures of what I found when I really dug into it. Needless to say everything that needed to be replaced has been replaced. The moral of the story is "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken poop" There's a big difference in maintaining a vehicle, and just fixing something when it doesn't work. The guy I purchased the car from only fixed stuff when it didn't work. Lesson learned.

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[124JOE]

mabey you could clean it with the pine-sol or viniger soaking

or just replace them

[klweimer]

Heater cores are very reasonable from Autoricambi. I ended up replacing the core, the valve, the valve side heater tube and the tube from the heater to the water pump. I'm guessing your tube from the water pump to the heater doesn't look much better. I purchased the core and valve from Autoricambi and the tubes from Allison's. Buy some extra gaskets for the core and the valve, I ended up shaving off the annular rib around the hole on the gasket to get them to sit well against the core and valve.
Kirk

[So Cal Mark]

I've got heater cores, blower motors with fans, heater valves and of course the stainless steel pipes in stock now