Radiator Drain Plug?

[McCormack]

My OWN son did a radiator flush and afterwards burnt his head gaskets. The reason? He didn't know to turn the heater on.. So he had a huge air pocket and that air was right there in the heads.
I'd bet a large part of my inheritance on low coolant being the cause of most if not all headgasket and head failures.
BTW Most other vehicles I see today have a constant coolant flow thru the heater core. Heat is applied by opening a air flow gate in the system. I don't know of any others that actually shut the flow of coolant off and on.
Big Jim

If your OWN son's heater wasn't on when he refilled his Ranger's cooling system, then I'd bet my inheritance that his heater also wasn't on when he drained his coolant system, so his heater core would have still been full of coolant when he refilled his system, and thus it wasn't his heater that caused his head gasket failure.

And besides you can't argue with physics - air rises in water/antifreeze, and when coolant exits Ranger heads the coolant travels in an upward path towards the radiator's intake pipe on top of the radiator, so any air that's in the system will rise and go into the the radiator, and when the coolant warms and is pressurized the air will be forced out of the radiator and into the catch tank, and thus air pockets are not a problem on Ranger trucks.
Air pockets are usually only a problem on vehicles (usually four bangers) whose head(s) sit above the rest of the cooling system, and thus the air can't rise to get out. Those types of vehicles generally will have some type of bleeder valve on the engine to bleed the air out of their cooling systems.

What probably happened to your son's vehicle is that when filling his cooling system he didn't wait for his engine to warm up and the thermostat to open, and because of that he didn't get the system completely full, and his engine overheated from the lack of coolant. Waiting for the thermostat to open is something that you have to do when refilling the cooling system of just about any vehicle on the road today, and thus I stand by my statement that Ranger cooling systems aren't any more difficult to refill than any other vehicle.

 

[Psychopete]

Those petcocks have always drained real slow for me (like a few beers slow), I get bored and just go for the lower hose and use a big pan.

Edit:
My Tempo was almost a gallon low once! LOL It's still running good w/ 143K. We all gets leaks sometimes and might not be obvious at first.

 

[barrys]

Does anyone know -- or better have a pic -- of where the "engine coolant drain plug(s)" are in the 3.0 V6?

They are mentioned in the crappy non-shop manuals and they're vague about whether they should be removed for coolant flush.