I drive a 98 Ecsort as my daily driver while my Camaro is not running well enough to be a daily driver. When I got to work this morning, the coolant in the resivour was boiling, and the fan was not running. The temp was fine until I hit stop-and-go traffic, then it jumped up to hot. So, I figure that the fan is no longer working properly. The question is, would it be the temperature switch or the fan itself?

 

first thing is to run a jumper to the fan to see if it will run. If the fan runs. Then you move on to things like wiring, relays, temp switches. Does the fan run on a switch or is it computer controlled, fed by a sensor?

 

It has a "temperature control switch", whatever that means. Stupid electric fan. SO, you mean run a jumper from the battery to the fan? Could I use jumper cables to test it? Yes, I know the term "jumper" is not literal, but I don't have any spare wire lying about.

 

I doubt you could get jumper cables onto the fan terminals but yeah I mean get some wires and go right from the fan to the battery...just a few seconds will tell you if the fan runs. if not replace fan motor. if it does check the wire harness for voltage/ground. check the relay. replace the switch. a test light would help a lot.

 

Yeah, I have all that stuff at home. Handy dandy test kit.

 

yeah IROCmonkey has the right idea, direct power right to the fan, first and see if that works and work from there..

 

Well, I pulled the fan and jumped it. It worked, so I replaced the coolant temp sensor, based on the advice from the "tech" at autozone. Which turned out to be the wrong thing, as the fan STILL is not working. So, it looks like I am going to have to replace the coolant temp switch. Unfortunatly, I discovered that the upper radiator hose connector (the spot where the hose slips on to the radiator) has broken in half, leaving me with a small ledge instead of a tube. So, I slapped on some gasket sealer around the hose for a quick fix, and of course it let go about halfway to work this morning. Fortunatly, I still have my old 91 escort in mom's backyard, and the part #'s for the radiators on both cars match, so I can just swap them out. If replacing the switch dosen't work, I am just going to wire up a manual switch in the cabin. Ground from battery to fan motor, hot from battery to switch, from switch to fan motor.

 

hmm before you wire up a switch, you might want to trace the fan wiring harness back to the relay, and see if the relay is working correctly.

 

Well, here we go again! After switching out the temp control switch, and swapping out the radiators, I discovered that the car would not start. Several compression tests later, we discovered that the head gasket is blown. At least I got my Camaro running again, to drive in the meantime.