So, where were all the Manchester '8s while I was stranded on the M60 today?

[moltuae]

I stood stranded on the hard shoulder for an hour in the rain, with nothing to do but watch the traffic go by, and I still didn't see any of you!









Well, it was a pretty dramatic breakdown, but thankfully all sorted now.

I was overtaking (fairly enthusiastically, admittedly) in the outside lane, when it happened. Do you remember what the shuttle looked like taking off? ... well it was like that. Suddenly, all I could see in my rear view mirror was my own personal cloud, and I don't mean Dropbox. There were huge plumes of steam, engulfing the entire carriageway. Drivers behind me must've thought they'd hit dense fog.

I got across the three lanes as quickly as I could, pulled over and switched the engine off, just as the coolant level warning light illuminated. For a moment I thought the worst (head gasket), but as I started to rationalise and think about it I realised it couldn't be anything serious since there was no loss of power and the engine was still running perfectly smoothly until the moment I switched it off.

To cut a long story short, once it was back at the garage, the culprit was soon identified. The crappy little plastic clip that holds the coolant temperature sensor in place had worked loose and the coolant temp sensor had popped out, resulting in 3 or 4 litres of coolant gushing out and instantly vaporising as it hit the red hot exhaust.

Thankfully, there was still plenty of coolant in the block, so no harm done. Temp sensor was refitted, coolant refilled and I was back on the road in less than half an hour after arriving at the garage.


Has anybody found a good method of securing the plastic retaining clip? I was thinking tape, but space is tight down there and it's very difficult to access it sufficiently to wrap tape around the clip completely.