Watching this Viagra ad and thinking it is just plain wrong

[csziggy]

This is the one where the guy pulls up to a gas station in the middle of nowhere with his Mustang like car overheating. He turns the car off, walks to the cooler, gets a cold bottle of water, walks back to the car, opens the radiator cap and pours in the cold water.

Aside from the idea of ice cold water being good for erectile disfunction, this violates everything I ever was taught or experienced about dealing with an overheated vehicle. But then, I am not a mechanic and don't know if car cooling systems have changed in the last twenty years.

I was taught that you don't turn the car off, spray water over the engine and radiator exterior to cool it off, do NOT add cool water to a hot engine, put water in the overflow reservoir, not in the radiator. And then of course, there is the danger of opening the radiator cap on a boiling hot pressurized system. From everything I was taught, the guy should have gotten seriously injured from opening the radiator and ended up with a cracked block on his little muscle car.

Or am I hopeless behind the times on how to deal with a modern car that has overheated?

[Duer 157099]

1. Well I avoid watching any commercials when possible, so haven't seen this one

However, you are correct about how utterly insane it is to take the cap off of a hot radiator (unless of couse the radiator is empty in which case nothing will spray out). Maybe the message is about how dangerous it is to use viagra? :shrug: Truth in advertising, perhaps?

[csziggy]

2. Now that is a take I didn't come up with!

I was worrying more about cracking the block.

[texanwitch]

3. One of my housemates is a ER nurse, she has stories about guys taking to many pills.

Not a good thing.

Maybe mother nature does things a certain way for a reason.

[BlueIris]

4. You don't have to take too many pills to experience the scary side effects

of Viagra. Blindness, anyone? I hate Viagra.

[sarge43]

5. Yeah, pop the radiator cap on a hot engine is a quick and dirty way to get

second or third degree burns, also could boil the eye balls. Second most stupid amateur 'mechanic' stunt.

[seabeyond]

6. i never watch tv, but when hubby comes to our room and turns on. lately football. i will get hooked

on a commercial, follow along the story line, the music only for it to inevitaby be a viagra ad.... and i laugh. geeez, another viagra ad pulled me in. lordy, those ads.

[AngryAmish]

7. I thought spraying water on the engine block is a good way to crack the block.

Put fluid in the overflow. Let it sit. If you turn it on run the heater.

[csziggy]

9. We've done it with a mildly overheated engine while running

To cool it down enough to open the radiator. Of course, that many why that truck eventually ended up with a cracked block a hundred thousand miles later. :(

Yeah, running the heater can help since it gives more area to circulate the fluid and radiate heat. But when you have a car overheat in 95 F Florida weather, this is not something that you really want to have to do!

[flvegan]

8. It's a Camaro.

Other than that, you're right. I like to suspend disbelief and pretend he's in the station house for a good half hour before he goes back out and adds the water. He'd also likely need more than just the one bottle.

But the car is pretty sweet.

[csziggy]

10. I'm not up to date on muscle cars

They are cute in the right environment. In fact, I never realized that I once owned a muscle car!

Watched Pawn Stars the other day and they had a 1969 Buick Skylark that they called a 'muscle car' - I never thought of my '67 Skylark as one. In fact I treated that poor car like a truck, which is what I should have owned. Did you know, Skylarks were really bad at fording streams and they are not easy to drive through deep sand? And if you drive one really fast through standing water, the water would splash up into the distributor cap and kill the engine so you have to take the distributor cap off, dry it out and wait for all the moisture in the contracts to dry out before the car will start again?

When you are working on a horse farm, living in the National Forest, and like scoping out trails to ride horseback, a Skylark is a very, very bad choice. :rofl:

[flvegan]

11. Pretty much any 2 door from that era

that had a well-powered small block (or more) could be considered a muscle car. The Skylark's were fantastic cars, but the one on Pawn Stars wasn't (until they spent the cash to get her fixed up...I'd have not gone with the matte black paint).

Sounds like you speak from unfortunate experience, but even without hearing it from someone who has been there, done that...I'd have guessed along those lines.