Hi y'all.

I had a grinding noise coming from what I thought to be the coolant pump (oops, WATER pump - us Torpedomen get to work with COOLANT pumps, which pumps nothing but seawater, wheras a WATER pump does antifreeze and water...) and sure enough, it was the water pumps bearings. The pully had quite a bit of free play in it, wiggled from side to side. I had been guessing it was bad, thought the noise came from it, but only after we took the stoopid thing off did we confirm that the pump was shot. While we were at it, we changed hoses, serpentine belt and went to a 180-degree thermostat. Car runs cooler now and I just saw the stupid fan kick in for the first time ever. At least I know the coolant system works as designed.

Just wanted to share that, even if it was TMI.

-The Husband

 

Since you did the stat, you should have the fans come on at a lower temp. Is it a TPI car? If so, those are a lil more sensitive to temp changes than TBI or carb. While it will run coller, the ECM will no go into closed (?) loop. There are off-the-shelf chips that are mostly garbage, and if the car is a TPI car then you have 2 fans. Get a chip from http://www.fastchip.com/ . His chip is the best, aside from making your own, and get a cooler fan switch.

PS, give the system a good flush, put in a 50/50 mix, and a bottle of Redline Water Wetter. After this, the car should never overheat, or run hot. And you will have a lot more power. Just make sure the lower air dam is on there, or it can overheat at highway speeds.

 

I was planning on getting a custom chip (once I get a few more mods done), but I've heard before that the even though the theromstat opens sooner, it isn't really bad at just 180 degrees. The car stil warms up nice and fast, and yes, the airdam is in good shape. Gotta be carful about parking into curbs, but I combat-park (back in whenever possible). It is TPI, but I never got hot enough to kick in the second fan. Never have problems when the car is rolling. And now the engine is quieter, not having a bad pump grinding itself to pieces.

-The Husband

 

Yeah, its nice having that piece of mind.