I lost all my coolant through a broken head stud, but I'm changing all
my hoses too, since the engine's out anyway. Pulling the old ones off
has on occasion left me slack-jawed with amazement that coolant wasn't
pouring out. One of the elbow-looking hoses attached to the oil cooler
was held on with a "regular" type hose clamp and was screwed down so
tight that all the rubber had sqeezed out the sides and through the
holes in the band. It was probably leaking, so the PO did the
"logical" thing and TIGHTENED IT! Few things are as annoying as having
to buy $50 worth of spring-type hose clamps because some ding-dong
backwoods mechanic decided they were too hard to deal with and
replaced 'em with "hose-cutters".

> Because of that experience, I changed every hose on my Vanagon when I installed the new engine.  Those hoses can and will fail catastrophically.  Unfortunately I had to learn this the hard way.
>