G'day MarnO, I suppose if you are ever going to live without a heater core then Broken Hill is the probably the place to do it.......at least during the day. I took my heater core down to our local radiator place. It think it cost me around $60. I'm not sure if they use some sort of caustic sort of solution or just plain ol'water. I've dig up a couple of pics of what was inside mine, when I first disassembled it. Cheers, Ben.I peeked a look at my heater core the other day. Looks bout 10 times worse than yours. A little bit of a cleanout might be in order these days off.