a worthy junkyard radiator, and more...

[daeron]

O K....

 

This is a long post. Towards the end, i put down several page breaks, and the words TO RECAP... if you wanna just read an abstract hit that part first. the rest of the epic is just filling in every last detail of my cooling issue with my car. if anyone actually has any points that need clarification, then i may be upset i made everyone read this whole thing, because im trying to avoid having any more questions asked of me, yanno?? anyhow, read on.

 

So, i got up early this morning and went to the boneyard. there was an additional wagon at the cheaper place (it wasnt there saturday.) and upon popping the hood, it had what appeared to be a BRAND new radiator in it. (this is not the yard i found the new plugwires and disty cap in, its their next door neighbor.) it was a single core, but so was mine. Rad and reservoir topped off with what appeared to be pure coolant, and i almost squeaked. i had planned on just nabbing the rad and the stock electrical fan out of the other one. This car had 101K on it, so the radiator probably just "went bad" and got replaced... its not OEM i dont think, it had a made in .. well, i cant recall the country now. i dont think it was thailand, taiwan, indonesia, or malaysia... but it was something in that vicinity... NOT japan, it had metal tanks and was shiny black. it DID have what appeared to be a brand new fan shroud, and that had a brand new subaru part sticker on it. nabbed both, and the fan out of the other car. 35 bucks and i can get a 7 dollar core refund.. and i hald the fan bolted to the radiator, and just showed them the blank side... innocently enough, and they HAD quoted me 25 on saturday.... but i got away with it, so i paid nada for what wouldve been a 12 dollar fan. on the other hand, it was untested and unwarranted... so it was a bit of a risk that i was getting nothing for nothing..

 

Anyhow, the fan worked good, the radiator works well, my old one was on its way out.. it had lost a decent amount of finning to time, oxidation, and mistreatment over 20 years and 140K.. and, somehow i had also failed to notice how godawfully gummed up with road grime the thing was. seriously, any cooling issues i had probably couldve been solved by cleaning it, and taking out the thermostat (which i also did today).

 

Anyhow, the entire reason for this foray was this.. Never had any problems with heat in the car, until one day the thermostat started to stick.. no big deal, put a new thermostat in. the old one was 160, the new one 180. I have the 87 green digidash, which has a temp guage with ten bars on it.. the bottom bar is dead cold to something... low. maybe 110, 115? before i ever had any thermo problem, it ran at the third tick mark... religiously. on a hot day, it would pop up to the fourth bar. afterwards, it ran hotter (naturally) but it also heated up above its standard running temp (then either 4 or 5 bars) occasionally. not seriously, but it never had before. fast forward to about mid may, the car suddenly overheated. on the road, in the middle of a night of pizza delivering. thought i saw steam from the vicinity of the water pump.I nursed it back to the store, and let it cool off, filled it up with water, drove home stopping to check occasionally.. and eventually discovered that the upper rad hose was blown around the clamp.. so i replaced.. but then started leaking again, and i confirmed that there was an issue at the water pump. replaced it, and im still losing coolant. no leaks, no drips, but it took me a while to eventually decide that i wasnt just still burping out air pockets i hadnt flushed out of the system yet. Once you pour a few gallons of water in the thing, total, you eliminate air bubbles as a possibilty. I followed procedure, ive known about this since i was a wee lad, my dad taught me to do it with every car.. i have just come to learn that the soob community NEEDS to use my hose burping trick. Anyways, im living with it, adding water, and seeing temperature spikes. some of the time it was caused by cavitation in the water pump from low levels, im sure.. and by spikes i mean its getting up to the 8-10th bars.. the top two are red.. and dropping back down to at least relatively normal temp (~4-6 bars) quickly, and usually all at once (ie guage goes from nine bars = red to five bars) Sometimes it takes longer than others, sometimes it doesnt cool off as quick, but it never stayed red for any period of time.. rarely even got that high. Most of the time, im convinced it was a sticking thermostat. It behaved too cut and dry exactly like that for it not to be the case. however, there was more going on, and i think i may need head gaskets. i feel the new thermostat probly got overheated at one point, and got

 

I had coolant bubbling out into the reservoir for some time.. and upon doing this job, i may well have had the battery squashing the radiator overflow hose this whole time... not completely restricting flow back into the radiator, but severely limiting it... I also have the aftermarket fan that my brother put on.. It has a smaller footprint than the stock fan does, but it sure seems to blow air real good.. however, (i know, i know, this ones my fault) it was only ever held in place by one bolt, at the top outside corner of the radiator. the little plastic zip tie thingy that was holding the other corner down, so the fan actually sat flush against the rad to draw air thru it... that thingy broke a long time ago.. and the fan has been sucking air from around it, not directly over the condensor/radiator. turning on the AC sometimes seems to aggravate it, sometimes it seems fine.. but in the long run using AC accelerated the rate at which i lost water.

 

Now, enter the fan questions... this aftermarket fan has a stock plug spliced onto it. It turns on with the key, off with the key.. regardless of temp, or AC status. the stock plug only has one wire actually spliced onto the fan; the ground wire has to be grounded somewhere manually. (thermostat housing, the bolt that holds the vaccum lines down) When i plugged the stock fan i got today into the car's wiring harness, it did not work. I verified that the fan works, and i tried turning on the AC, and i let it heat up to three bars on the meter.. that was as high as i got it parked in the driveway, AC on, without actually driving it. Driving with AC, it eventually gets up to four bars now. YAY it cools good, no sticking, no hotspot. My question, i guess, is this. These fans get constant live power whenever the accesories are on, and the ground is switched by the thermoswitch???? which thermoswitch is this? should i bother finding the reason why my fan wont turn on the "right" way or should i go ahead and cut the wires on the stock fan to wire it up the same way my aftermarket fan is?? i left the aftermarket on there (properly secured this time) because it was alot easier to postpone cutting the wire on the stock fan, than putting it back together later if i changed my mind.

 

and, just to make sure, no thermostat, south florida.. the cooler the better, right?!??? ive never had any problems with cold weather. not like, with my car.. i mean, ive seen freezing temperatures a few times in the last couple years. is there ANY realistic detriment to running without the thermostat? is running with only three bars on that digital guage in some strange way "running too cold?" I cant see any problem with this, ive read people saying no thermostat is fine all year long blah blah.. but i am seriously ruling out alternative diagnoses to "blown headgasket" by way of replacing the radiator here.. i dont have access to real tools etc, so its one thing for me to pull and swap a radiator and a fan, but i have to be at the shop to check compression and leak down test and theres all sorts of family politics involved in working at the shop and i dont have much time to dedicate to a field trip to work on my car... because the shop is a day trip, and the rad swap is a driveway thing, at my house.

 

 

 

So, to recap.. i had some thermostat issues, that were mostly solved, but it never ran so perfectly cool again.. (160* to a 180*, so yah..) but it got hot on occasion, where it never had before. i wound up blowing a rad hose and a water pump... but didnt overheat too seriously at any point. it got to the red, but i cooled it off okay because when it overheated on me big-time, it was cavitating and eventually found itself something at least. cooled down.

 

replaced water pump, and now have removed (semi-new) thermostat and replaced radiator (and hoses). Properly secured elec. fan, no block flushing yet. my buddy has a machine, i wanna do that soon, and then if im not leaking fill up with full antifreeze.. as much for anti rust as anything else. I want to get the stock elec fan working on the thing, but i dont know if i should just chop the plug and wire it like the existing aftermarket fan is wired, or if its reasonable to find and fix the problem. My aftermarket fan fits in the fan shroud for the clutch fan, so i might just remove that and try both electrics.. but how does the fan get switched, if its still set up as from factory? and, if i still keep losing coolant, and getting some hotspots, and experiencing some boil-off into the overflow.. these things do point me further on the road to headgasket right?

 

one final point.. i noticed that my new locking stant radiator cap had a tendency to leak some steam into the reservoir whenver i touched it, at ALL while the engine was hot, and not running. is this a problem? should i try to put a second rubber gasket in there to fill up a bit of space? is the rad cap just behaving as it should?

 

thanks for the reading the long post. like i said, i dont get alot of time to do any mainline work, because i have few tools at my house. I do, however, get alot of time to think and talk about my car... which is why that was so long.

 

hopefully the little abstract at the end saved some people some time... :-\