I am going to perform the coolant bypass mod and was wondering if there is a way of doing it without draining the coolant first?

 

You don't need to drain the coolant. Are you going to install Motordyne's Iso-thermal upgrade? For the Motordyne bypass, just cut the hose and install the bypass valve. A small ammount of coolant will leak, nothing to worry about.

 

^^^ +1

You don't need to drain the coolant. That sounds like a Skunk procedure. Totally not needed.

 

Just so you know - I got air bubbles in the system and didn't know it doing this. My heat would go cold when idling. It was fixed by bleeding the air out of the coolant system - but you should probably do this right away and not wait a year like I did (cause I didn't know till the weather got cold).