I'm jumping in on this. I will probably look like a huge noob too, but here we go.
Some you may have seen that my RR bit the dust last weekend, anyways, the only problem I had with heating/cooling before Sunday was that after a few minutes driving steam/smoke, whatever, would slowly come out of all the vents inside the car. My dad thinks it's either heater hoses in the wrong spots or the heater core is shot. The car would take about 5-10 minutes to heat up and idle normally. The temp gauge never read over normal, even when it was dieing and smoking after it died. and would read normal after the 5-10 minutes.
I filled, or so I thought, the radiator with coolant, 50/50, I poured almost the whole container into the radiator. So I thought I was fine. But the steam/smoke still appeared after a few minutes of driving. Sunday... I drive out to a friends house before we start on our drive. Everything is fine up until now, other than the smoke/steam from vents. We start on our journey and everything is going fine. In the first section of twisties I notice smoke/steam shooting out from above my passenger side headlight. That goes away after the corners. Then we get to the mountain and the car starts lurching and squeaking anytime I touch the gas. At one point, smoke/steam BILLOW out of all my vents inside the car. Floor, Defrost, Dashvents, everything. Then it disappears. We get to a 1st gear corner where there is always traffic, this is the WORST section of road in history for traffic flow. I'm in first gear and the car just dies.
Later we find out that the VC melted the hose from the IM to the FPR. Which could have caused the lurching and dieing. I call my aunt's bf and he comes and takes a look at it. Says it sounds like I've lost compression in one or more cylinders. Checks the radiator and reservoir tank, nothing, dry as a bone. Essentially I overheated my engine.
Did I not have enough coolant, or did something else happen with the coolant that caused it to disappear? The car never had any liquid under it except for gear oil. Any insight would be very helpful.
I know I don't have a VE. But I don't want to start a new thread in another section about a similar issue.