A couple weeks ago I did a bunch of work to the wife's Z (350 vortec, hsr, etc). Replaced thermostat, resealed plenum, new dizzy, replaced a bunch of old crusty wiring including the cooling fan wiring. Everything seemed to be working great!

Until she drives it a couple days, and tells me it's running hot, 240+. The way I had her set up, it was previously unusual for teh Z to break 200!

OK. Problem. I spent the weekend pouring over the car. Completely stumped, was I.

Last night, I had let her get good and hot, and was standing at the front of the car, a few inches away. Suddenly it occurs to me that despite being a cool night for Florida, my legs are sweating?

Reaching down in front of the grill I feel hot air blowing out of it. My dumb a**clown self had wire the fans up backi-wards. Sort of tough for the radiator to cool anything when you are blowing 300*+ engine air through it I guess....

LOL.

So yeah. If you ever get stumped with a cooling issue... particularly if it seems the car gets hotter and hotter even at highway speed, or if it seems to get hotter faster once the fans kick on, make sure your fans are spinning the right way. Could be, you or your car's PO are as daft as me!

 

At least you found it before any thing was damaged, so...no harm no foul

 

It takes a lot of guts to admit something like this, but we've all done it at some time or another. It's a great lesson; check, double check, and check it again when your done.


.

 

 

Now if I can just figure out why when I put it in drive, it goes backwards....


J/K, J/K....

 

Lucky for us he didn't install the space shuttle rocket engines!!!

 

I once went hunting in my early 20s with a few friends and when we were done we met up at the car and discussed what we saw. I stood by a large oak tree and did my business and leaned my $900.00 shotgun against the tree. When I was through we loaded up and went home and 5 miles down the road I remembered the shotgun leaning against the tree.
A true story up in Michigan; three guys went duck hunting in a escalade and they got to the ice and took some dynamite, lite it up and threw it as far as they could. The dog bailed out of the back in a dead run and retrieved the dynamite and was on his way back like the good dog he was. The guys panicked and started yelling and finally got there guns and started shooting at the poor dog. The dog then panicked and ran under the escalade for cover untill his master regained his sanity. The escalade (brand new) then blew up and sank below the ice. Both stories are true. I did the first one with a LC Smith double barrel 20 gauge and when I worked in higher education I read the second in an article on-line. I wonder what that dog was thinking on the way back.

 

Actually have a similar story to you with a customers 5.0 Mustang. He brought in a 90 model Mustang where I worked that would overheat at exactly 30 mph. Driving 30 mph the car would overheat to the point of boiling over. At idle the car cooled fine. Driving 50-70 mph and above the car would run nice and cool. Well the first guy to look at it couldn't figure out at thing. I started looking it over and realized it had a flex fan. I thought oh cool. Until I started the car up and realized that the fan was blowing air past my legs when I stood in front of the car. Ironically the parts house had given him a flex fan with the wrong rotation direction and it simply reversed the airflow through the radiator.

 

What year was that LC Smith?

 

Hmmm. Sounds suspiciously like the classic Aussie short story 'The Loaded Dog' by bush poet Henry Lawson in around 1900 (minus the Escalade of course )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loaded_Dog

 

The president of the college I worked at brought the story to my attention since he and I hunted together some. The LC Smith was bought by my grandfather brand new in Eldorado Arkansas in the 1940s I think. He thought it was a 410 seeing it in a store window as he drove through town and he sent a friend after it. It ended up being a 20 gauge field grade. I really don't know what it is worth but he was offered over $900.00 when I was a child in the 70s.

 

I owned a car for about 3 years before I noticed the fan was running backwards. I have no idea how long it was like that, somebody before me had wired it up wrong.