📸 Before you start
Step 0 · two minutes, and it protects your warranty
Find the heat tabs & photograph them
Before the engine goes anywhere near your vehicle, find the heat tabs and take a photograph of each one. This is the single most useful two minutes you will spend on this installation, and it is entirely in your favour.
- What they are: small round metal buttons, roughly the size of a shirt button, silver or gold, with soft metal filling the middle.
- Where they are: on the side of the block, high up — usually two or three of them.
- Intact means that soft centre is still full and level.
- Melted means it has run out, leaving a hollow dish, often with a bright silver trail running down below it.
- How to shoot it: one photo per tab, square-on, from about a hand's width away, with a light on them.
Why it is worth doing: a heat tab is a temperature witness. Intact tabs rule overheating out and work firmly in your favour if you ever need to make a claim — they are proof the engine was never cooked. Melted tabs mean the engine has been overheated, which is not covered, and that is exactly why you want a photograph taken before you fit it: it shows the condition it arrived in, not the condition somebody assumed.
Photograph them again after the first proper heat cycle, and keep both sets with your paperwork. If you cannot find the tabs, photograph the area and say so — tell us, do not guess.