So I took the longest trip yet with the K5. 120 miles round trip to Webster and back. Not a lot, I’ll give you that, but up until this trip, all I have driven it is 15 miles at a shot around town, etc. The purpose of this trip was to pickup a rust free tailgate I located on Craigslist. Paid $45 for the tailgate and the seller threw in a replacement floor pan for the passenger side and some miscellaneous trim I didn’t even know I was missing. Another $20 and I had a fully rebuilt front driveshaft in hand. All in all, it was a very worth while trip!
The trip up to Webster went quite well. It held 65mph just fine cruising down rte 104. The oil pressure was fine while cruising down the road. When I finally pulled off of 104, it dropped a bit low and I could hear a slight noise (I hesitate to call it a knock) from the motor that I did not recall hearing before. This kind of troubled me…
I stopped at my destination where I was for about an hour and then started on my return trip. On the way back home, the temperature started to creep up. It wasn’t getting too high, but still high enough to worry me. Every other trip that I had taken never resulted in the temperature rising this high. I turned on the heat (it was a bit chilly out anyway) and dropped the windows. I used the heat to gauge whether I was loosing any coolant. While driving down the highway, the heat stayed steady on the high side of the factory gauge. Every time that I would drive through a small town, it would drop down… I think I know what’s going on..! I’ll elaborate when I get time to dig into it.