I think I ruined my Volvo engine. Water pump repair that involved broken bolts led to solid advice on this site. Decided I needed to rethread a shaft that was stripped out. The bolt for it wouldn't fit. I went out and bought a heli-coil kit. Drilled out the hole a little bigger and to the same length of the M6 x 1 pitch bolts. Threaded the shaft with a tap one size bigger, then screwed in the heli-coil which allows you to use the same screw of original size. I did this very carefully. Turned out great. Here's where the retard in me kicked in.

I did a dry run with the water pump AFTER doing the tap and heli-coil number. When I placed the gasket on the block, I discovered I'd tapped the WRONG hole. The water pump has five openings for screws and bolts. This hole was for none of them. It's a separate hole, maybe a drainage hole of some kind, it's a hole right near the timing belt on the engine block. If you pull the water pump off, it would be on the right side of the block.

Had I taken a second to slip on the gasket I would've seen I was tapping the wrong hole, but I didn't. I wasn't drunk or high when I did this either, which makes it worse. Cold sober.

I left the newly tapped hole alone, heli-coil still in it. Put the water pump on, added fluid, everything seemed fine. I put the rest of the parts back together, fan, etc. Cranked her up and....white smoke, water and antifreeze came out the exhaust pipe.

The good news is that it's raining, so my Volvo is adding to the water table here and being ecologically correct by feeding water and a taste of antifreeze back into the ground. That makes me feel groovy.

The bad news is I don't know what I'm doing.

My question is, what was the extra hole that I just drilled out, tapped, and made a perfect M6 x 1 pitch screw for? Did I just bust through to the block and is that why the car is kicking out white smoke?




Thanks
Cuddy