Your Car's Radiator for Dummies

Radiator and cooling system

If you spent as much time reading the output of internet freelancers as our research team does, you might occasionally be inclined to tearing out your hair or simply tearing up (gotta love those homographs). One of the most common signs that a freelancer is faking it by rewording text that he or she doesn't understand is a tendency to make little slips in facts or logic. Their output can make someone with just passing knowledge scratch a head and wonder, "Is that right?" This time, we found eHow.com contributor Lina Schofield holding forth in an area where she's already proven a significant lack of knowledge, the Automotive category, when she pretended to help readers understand "What Causes Car Radiator Overheating and Boiling?" Oh, and Leaf Group has moved it to ItStillRuns.com, even though it doesn't...

Schofield, who claimed to have gotten her information by interviewing a mechanic named "Jack Jones" (yeah, sure: "The race is on and here comes pride up the backstretch!"), managed to get some of it right by listing some of the common causes of overheating:

• defective radiator cap
• leaking head gasket
• defective thermostat
• low coolant
• malfunctioning fan

Lina also added something she called "seals"; which we figured was pretty much covered by the radiator cap and the head gasket, and maybe the radiator hoses, which she never mentioned. She also never mentioned the water pump, heater core or transmission cooler. Too, we found a few of her claims somewhat questionable, such as "The radiator additionally keeps the pistons in working order, allowing the engine to run." "The fan is hooked up to the radiator through a network of various wires that can become prone to corrosion over time, and the radiator can overheat if the fan isn't providing adequate air circulation when at a stop or standstill if it gets hot enough." "Low coolant level is usually a sign of a problem in one of the other parts of the radiator like the head gasket or radiator cap."

Now we don't know about you, but when we see someone claiming that the radiator "keeps the pistons in working order" or that the head gasket is "[part] of the radiator" (though you might argue that it's part of the cooling system, terminology Lina also doesn't use), we begin to seriously doubt that person's competence to discuss an internal combustion engine. And that line about the fan? Only an English major would think that the fan is "hooked up to the radiator through a network of various wires" is sufficient to explain the function of a cooling fan. Idiot. We also found ourselves snickering at Lina's hamfisted discussion of coolant chemistry.

Nope, it comes as no surprise that Schofield is talking through her hat here, because she's done it before: it was common for eHow contributors to glom onto a topic and write about it for all it's worth, even if they didn't know jack about it. Lina's a prime example, with dozens of articles on car repairs, invariably containing misinterpretation and misinformation like that found here, mistakes caused by a lack of familiarity with the topic – and that's why Schofield's collecting her fourth Dumbass of the Day from us.

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DD - RADIATORS