I posted in cooling to get a response to the major portion of this, but part of the story is better of in this forum i believe, i'll bold the portion id like adddressed


well. i just got my car back...well ive had it, it has just been at school for about 4 months were i was performing body work and painting the car.

its an 82 z28.

well after i finished getting it back to a driveable condition(body panels and such on) we took her for a ride. probably 2 hours or so.

After an hour or so i noticed the temp gauge was 260..which was slightly weird because before it didnt read anything at all. I thought to myself maybe we should pull over pop the hood and see if anythings obviously hot. Well nothing...the top radiator hose was warm to the touch but not unbearable.

I figured maybe the wire to the sensor grounded out on something, since it was dark and the engine was hot i didnt wanna go feeling around for it. After all the car was running extremely well the whole trip


now...fast fwd a few days. I had just put my side mirrors on and i thought id start up the car and let it run for a while...

well i noticed she wasnt kicking down off ....so i proceeded to tap the gas which normally after a few revs she'll drop done to 800 or so and idle smooth...but it was persist on just idling around 1250 or so. After i became frustrated...and cold(heat wasnt working...or hadnt had time to warm up, not sure) I turned the engine off, as i was doing this i noticed the gauge right in the middle(extremely odd)..so i started the car again and the needle pegged full hot...BEYOND the max reading (260??)

So i turn her off and pop the hood...i notice theyere was some fluid leaking from the radiator cap...yet the resevoir was slightly past "full hot" marker on the jug

..and that leaves me where i am now.

 

That last part sounds a bit like what happened to me when I put too much coolant and not enough water in mine. It just boiled over a bit, but didn't overheat, and was happy after that.