Well, I replaced the t-stat, its working much better for warming up, but now, the cooling fan doesn't kick on when the radiator gets hot. I've checked fuses, looked at wireing, nothing seems to be flakey, do fans usallaly suddendly quit working? or is that a bad fan sensor in the radiator?

Neither one of mine kicks on until the gauge gets up to about the 3/4 mark.

 

Other possibilities are:

corrosion around any of the connectors for the circuit;

(on my '82) the wire to the switch on the radiator wouldn't stay on the terminal, little squeeze with pliers took care of that;

the little ground wire on the top of the radiator to the body has been broken;

the temperature switch on the radiator, died.

i heard those thermoswitches in the rad go bad often...skip said the connections get dirty or corroded sometimes too...some people, me included, have a manual switch wired up so we can run the fans whenever we want.

 

if you want to test the fan, disconnect the connector and run wires directly from the battery to the fan. hope this helps...Tom gave real good possibilities too.

I had my fans stop working, I looked for a good twenty minutes before I realized that the plug had come off of the connector on the radiator. At the same time I noticed that the ac fan has the same connector, and I swapped them and now when the car gets hot both fans come on.

 

 

Alex

Your secondary electric fan should we wired into the AC circut to so when you turn on your AC the fan turns on and that's a quick test to see if the fan itself is dead. They also come on at a certain temp; dunno what temp but its DARN close to boil over! I put mine on a relay with a switch in the cabin and I only need it when im going stop light to stop light or in bumper to bumper trafic. As stated above the thermo switches go out pretty often

I grounded out the therm switch and the fan came to life, so the therm switch is bad, I hardwired the fan and now am on my way to the auto parts store.

wow, no one has it in stock, and it's 33 bucks! I decided I'm better off pulling one from pap for a buck.