Long story short, I blew the head gasket out of my 5.9 along with several other things. I liked the truck so I dropped in a brand new remanufacture from cummins. I drained all of the antifreeze/oil mix out of my radiator and brought it to a shop to be steam cleaned inside to get any residual oil out. After reassembling everything and driving for a while, I noticed alittle bit of oil skimmed on the radiator cap and floating in the overflow reservoir. I assume its from other areas of the pluming that didn't get steam cleaned. Is there anyway to get this out without draining everthing and refilling. Is a small bit of oil going to hurt anything?

 

While I havent tried it myslelf a buddy of mine sya sthat Dawn Dishsoap works good.

 

that may isolate the oil, but how do i get it out. dab it with paper towel???

 

Sorry, I missed reading the second part of your post - you will have to remove the rad and flush it out again.

 

Sometimes at the shop i work at if we have to flush oil out of the cooling system,we also use dish soap.We would fill up the system with water and put some dish soap in it.then we would run the engine up to temp,then drain the water out.We would do this two or three times until the oil was out of the system .Then fill up the system coolant.Hope this helps.

 

be shure to use dawn for dish washers or youll have foan everywhere, we do the same for the big natural gas engines, and they hold 100 gallons or more, but just refill w/ water and soap untill it comes clean then refill w/ new coolant.

 

Cascade works well any powder dishwasher soap. I would drain it when its still hot and let the engine cool down a bit the do it all again, just flush it with water at least twice to get all the soap out.

 

The Casacade trick works awesome and will leave the inside of the radiator and block like new.

Take a cup, THOURGHLY mix it with a gallon of water pour in the system top of with regular water and run for 100 miles or so, drain, refill with plain water, repeat driving, do this a couple of times and refill with the 50/50 mix of your choice.

May not be what you want to do but it works the best from what I have seen.

 

Dish soap doesnt really get rid of the oil it breaks it up and sinks it. I'm not sure how good it would be for your radiator. Theres a couple things called purple zone and Harbor that get rid of oil that will do the same thing as dish soap but alot more concentrated. If you do use the dish soap you can delute it alot it doesnt take much to make the shene dissapear. I run a Commercial fishing boat in AK and with a 20k fine for having an oil shene we play around with the stuff a bit.