A Small Surprise

Well here we are, a couple of rainy, dreary, cold weeks after bringing the GSX home, I’ve found a day to go spend some time with it. It seems the car didn’t appreciate being left outside alone for that long and has chosen to communicate that to me by accumulating a generous puddle of antifreeze in the footwell by the pedals. Great.

I sopped up the green puddle and removed some trim so I could pull up the carpet and dry the padding underneath, plus I’ll never pass up the opportunity to do some inspecting. The paint under the carpet is pristine, thankfully, and the puddle didn’t get anywhere it could have done any real damage. Still… where did it come from? The heater core was my only guess.

A week later I returned to find another, much smaller, and much less green puddle in the same place, which only made things more peculiar. If this was rainwater, how was it getting in? and why was it full of antifreeze last time? I’d get to the bottom of this if it was the last thing I did.

I began by searching for evidence of water entry. I started at the windows and the hatch, and worked my way down until I spotted a damp strip of trim at the bottom of the passenger door panel. Pulling the panel off, I was greeted with plenty of moisture all through the door panel and an aftermarket door speaker that was both wet and mossy. Lucky for me, removing the stereo in its entirety is something I’d already been thinking about for a while. In a project car I’d prefer to remove as much unnecessary complexity as possible (I’m looking at you next, A/C).

Time to figure out what’s going on here… I sat in the car while a friend dumped a bucket of water over the door and in seconds, a stream came spilling in right through the door speaker, literally seeping through the cone itself. What? I needed to dig deeper, and dig I did. I took out the slimy door speaker and tossed it straight in the bin before finding the root of the issue. The door speaker was actually mounted to a baffle which I can only assume was intended to PROTECT it from water dripping through the inside of the door, a completely normal thing (that’s why doors have drains at the bottom). However, this baffle protruded so far into the door that it instead caught the stream of water as it ran through the door and funneled it INTO the back of the speaker, through the vapor barrier, and right into the car. (Into the door panel first, which explains why the speaker grille has a touch of rust on it).

Problem found! I pulled the opposite door panel, extracted both speakers and baffles, tucked the speaker wires and sealed the holes with some plastic sheeting. We repeated the water bucket test on both doors to be sure before putting the door panels on and sure enough, bone dry! I lined the floors with towels and pig mats both over and under the carpet to sop up all the moisture and left with a smile.

But where did that antifreeze come from? I’m honestly not sure… it’s very possible that the heater core has a slow leak which combined with the rainwater to make a larger green puddle, but I would have expected to find at least some antifreeze in the water the second time. My second theory is that at some point in its life, antifreeze was spilled in the car, soaked into the carpet and pads, and just allowed to dry. Then, the entering rainwater rehydrated the dried coolant which created the green puddle.

“Inspect heater core” added to TO-DO list.