Luxrage posted:

I ended up flushing the radiator, there was almost nothing in the system and the reservoir tank has a bunch of sludge floating around in the top. I'm thinking that there is probably a bunch of air in the system which might have saved him from pulling all of that sludge water into the radiator in the first place. It would also explain why the heater doesn't work. I want to either pull the reservoir tank or flush it out in place to get any remaining crap out of it before I run the engine and properly purge the remaining air, though. I'm going to re-drain the radiator and see how much rust comes out of it when I do this as well. I noted after doing my flush and tightening the drain plug it hasn't leaked since so if the flush and air purge ends up being the fix then talk about dumb luck. I really don't want to have to replace that thermostat, I was looking at the location of it and man that looks miserable: