The Single Best Overheating Fix For All Classic Cars

I'll work on my janitorial skills and I'll clean that up so if you click that video you know it's very common for old cars to overheat and have problems with cooling once and for all we're going to show how we set it up which seems to be a good way to do it because it eliminates a problem we're down here at the proud Camaro owners establishment he has a very nice Camaro here with a big block in it and the thing runs hot and it drives it and he's tried like every option available except this one different radiators different fans different shrouds different electrics different Mechanicals dude we're going to get the bottom of it right now so a disclaimer right here right now there isn't no magic pill that you can throw at your car to fix this it's going to cost you no matter which way you look at it there's no dumping fluid in the radiator runs cooler whatever alcohol based mumbo jumbo we're gonna go drive this car we're gonna show you what it does the temperature how it creeps up and set up the tenant and then we're going to show you the correction so the proud Camaro owner instructed us to first drive on the freeway and he said it should get to about like 190 195 on the freeway and then once it's nice and warmed up do some side road driving and it should uh said it should get over 200 and once it gets over 200 it'll still like slowly creep up so let's see if what he says is true all right let's get on the freeway temperature is currently about 175. it's only been running for about three minutes foreign [Music] test drive later [Applause] [Music] it's a cooler day today it was about between 60 and 65 degrees on our drive on the freeway it actually did pretty good it stayed around it's like 175. yeah it was under 180. so it was about yeah 175 or so 180. it did good but the second week off the freeway it went up obviously we don't have enough airflow in traffic and then it just kept going up from there but the problem we found is when it went up and then we got back on the freeway it didn't go back down I think on a hot day the radiator wouldn't cut it either way he says he's having problems on a warmer day but this is a different configuration like I said the the whole drive system is different it used to have electric fan on the inside I don't think this car ever had a mechanical fan on it's always been electric but I think when he got it it had electric on the inside he moved the electric to the front here to push it because the new drive you put on is a long water pump he was planning on doing a mechanical fan with a shroud but if you measure it out the mechanical fan would be really small it'd only be like a 14 inch fan or so even though the Shroud has a little bump in it it's still not really covering the whole radiator and it's still going to have a problem in traffic so this is what we're working with so it's a 396 so it's board over so it's right around 4002 cubic inches it's you know big block Chevy this is the early cylinder heads so it doesn't have any accessory ports I guess you could say in the water jackets on the cylinder heads that big block Chevys normally have they normally have them on the top here so we're really limited on where we can put our probe for our fan on our new new setup he has this fan running all the time and this is it is a weaker fan it doesn't flow that much air but you can see it's only covering roughly 16 inches of the radiator and this radiator opening is around 23 inches this is a big block radiator it is a four row Copper Brass and then it does have the training cooler in it on the freeway it did okay we got off instantly it started going up it got up to about 190 right when we got the freeway and then we looped around got back on the freeway at that point it's still around 190 and then we got back off coming back through traffic and it got up to 220 in traffic like I said a cooler day we're only about 65 degrees outside and it just kept creeping you can physically watch the game just go right up and then we have one this is fuel injected so a season one probe here for the fuel injection and then we have a mechanical gauge in here this is a probe that they somebody added it had electric gauge in got it he thought the gauge was acting up so he went from the electrical to the mechanical just to make sure there wasn't a gauge and it was the same reading it's very difficult to change the gauges around so we're going to leave the mechanical so this is pretty much the only spot in this particular engine that we have to add a probe and we don't want to run a mechanical fan because for one it's a draw on the engine the Big Blocks won't really notice it as much but if you're looking for gas mileage and performance it's best to eliminate any drag on the engine so we're going to eliminate the fan and then we're gonna do electric fans and the fans don't need to run all the time because if you have this setup right the engine will be in an operating temperature and the fans will shut off like you're going down the freeway the fans don't need to be running they shouldn't be on so that's why we're gonna put a fan switch in here and it's going to control the new one has dual fans we'll show the new one here in a second and we'll kind of just briefly go over this really quick we'll go over a little more in depth here in a minute once we get it out but you want to have a good amperage alternator roughly around 100 amp I mean this is a single fan we're going to a double so in order to have enough amperage to run the fans to the CFM that they're supposed to run you didn't have have enough amperage out of the alternator to keep up with everything this is a newer style later GM style alternator I would assume it puts out roughly around 100 amp the charge wire here they added this as a 10 gauge it's a little a little small I might bump this up to an a gauge and some of the stuff we need to clean up like they got this fused here going to the battery I think this is for the fan that was on here before so we're going to clean up some of this wiring and we'll go in a little more depth of how to set it up right so I'm going to get this out we'll compare and go on from here I opened the petcock to take the pressure off of it but I probably didn't wait long enough that being this thing got almost 220 coming back it was still pretty warm I made a little bit of a mess normally open the petcock to get the pressure off and then you can open the cap but apparently we're a little too warm still I'll uh working my janitorial skills and I'll clean that up foreign [Music] stuff out that we're gonna be changing so we got the thermostat out the thermostat looks like it would probably be runnable I just wasn't sure on the temperature and I wanted to get the temperature that I want to use so we got the thermostat here we got the thermostat housing that we're changing because of just going to have a spot where we can add the probe for the fan switch that's why we're changing the thermostat housing then we have the radiator like I said this is a four core big block radiator this configuration you just put the fan zip tied through the fins and have the fan here on the front side and the fan was running all the time the added to the fuse box inside the car the gauge wire is the same gauge as the fan so that part of it was okay the ground was a little questionable the ground wire but it was okay that wasn't the problem of why it was getting hot it was a couple different things the radiator was borderline with the temperatures that we're running now so if we did a different fan configuration maybe a dual fan that were able to utilize the whole cooling part of the radiator it probably would have done better but on a hot day it's still didn't cut the cheese no matter which way you sliced it this just wasn't going to cool it this is what we're going to use to fix the problem good old Ron Davis radiator so this is part number 11-16 ca67t teas with the automatic transmission cooler in it so this is just for conventional small block Chevy big block replacement it's got the opposite Inlet Outlets so this was at LS deal it would have the top Inlet on the on the same side as the outlet this one has an optional recovery tank overflow on the Shroud which is really nice and clean really nice San ordeal and these fans are dual 13-inch fans and both of them together combined are 3 420 CFM with both of them on the relays that we're going to be running I'm running the painless dual fan relay which is the part number 30117 each fan is going to have its own relay so if one relay goes bad then you always have a fan this particular setup here is is one fuse does the whole deal but the fuse is a like like a maxi style board and it's a 70 amp fuse so it's definitely more fused than you need on the fans like I said really nice got the aluminum shroud fans are all built on too really clean so you're using the whole radiator and you can see that the size of the fans actually overhangs to the tank so you're using every ounce of the radiator and the way the shroud's made it's got these little flaps so when you're going to those speeds or sitting in traffic it's using the full shroud it's sucking it all through the radiator then when you get cruising down the road these flaps can open and it allows the air to go through the whole entire radiator so this is a recirculating style the nipple is on the bottom so this will go to the neck so if it does ever which is not going to get hot enough to overflow it'll catch it on the bottom here and then when it cools down it'll suck the water back in so your radiator is always full that's half the problem is this thing originally didn't have any sort of catch can it just had the hose coming down and dumping to the ground and you can see that when we stopped earlier because it got up to 220 degrees the water was already boiling and then it threw up now your radiator level is low then you drive from there on and then it's running hot hotter than it was before because you have a lower coolant level and the whole theory about that it's supposed to throw up and then it'll balance itself and it's supposed to be a certain level it's absolutely wrong that's the stupidest thing radiator is supposed to be full it's not supposed to throw up to a certain point and then balance this level out to low dude you're not throwing a bathtub or something here I don't know what okay so the way that I'm setting up this deal here to fix the problem is I'm running a 160 degree thermostat and the reason why I'm doing this is for a couple reasons is that this has the fuel injection system on it the sniper EFI I'm not sure if there's a time for this to go into like a closed loop system where it controls the fuel trim but it has a temperature probe so this allows it to get to a certain temperature for the fuel injection and also so you have a heater on these very cold days in San Diego bike and then we have our fan is going to come on in 185 so this will turn it on at 185 and then at 175 it'll turns it back off so that's the operating range of the engine so this is open at 160 so we have 25 degrees before the fans will come on and then it'll go down to 170 so you have so thermostat would pretty much be always open during operating temperature and then this is what's going to control your engine temperature so when you're driving down the freeway fan should turn off because you have more airflow you don't need your fans come on that should only be on in traffic you don't have the drag on the engine for a mechanical fan so your performance is better win-win-win if I mentioned this is also a dual Row one inch tube radiator here instead of the Copper Brass is a four row so these are a bigger passage than the original we can get this installed and get it wired up show you how to fix it this is a fix right here all right so we're getting close here we're getting close to getting this thing finished up I have one correction that I set on the Overflow here the one on the bottom I thought was recirculating fitting but the nipple is here there's a tube that comes over to the bottom this thing gets really full then it'll come out the bottom but it is recircuited recirculating circuiting is that like regurgitating recirculating we're not regurgitating but if it does throw up it'll come in here but it's not going to throw up I say this thing is going to get no hotter than 185 degrees and that's only because that's when the fans come on we got the relays and the fuse mounted over here some people have a little debate on the fuse normally they want the fuse closest to the battery so the shortest distance is a non-fused part this is somewhat breaking the law because this wire that comes from the battery that supplies voltage to the fuse is across the car so it's a couple feet long it's not infused so just keep that in mind be careful if you do that you want this in theory closest to your power source so the non-fused part of the wire is the shortest and so we got the wiring here all done we got the ground for everything on the cylinder head you want to make sure to either have a starter washer or a clean surface on your ground point so before I get the wiring all loomed up I like to check it and make sure that the fans are all wired right in the right direction so this is the Magnesium source so this is going to go to the distributor back here I'm going to tie in back there I'm going to test the fans here I want to make sure that they both come on and everything the air is flowing in the right direction obviously we want it sucking the air in not blowing it forward so we're gonna in a sense ground our relay or ground our temperature switch is what it does when it gets the temperature so we're just going to jumper it foreign directions pulling the air through the radiator both fans so everything's wired right and correct so we're going to go ahead and finish up hooking this up we have it full of coolant to the point that we can start it then we're going to loom it up so it looks like a factory deal so now I got it I got everything hooked up everything's finished up now I'm gonna go ahead and start it I'm going to double check make sure the thermostat opens around 160. I'm gonna get water flow make sure my coolant is topped off then we're going for a drive we're gonna hit the in and out and drive through and it's staying under 185 the whole whole thing hold Drive [Music] I'm wearing a cabinet [Music] this car sounds really good but I'm sorry Tom it is slow I'm saying it's kind of like a Mustang sounds really nasty but it doesn't go anywhere oh foreign [Music] got our got our food we ate car didn't even come close stayed 180 180 the whole drive through the fans come on they turn off the only thing is the fan switch is a little off of their advertised when it turns on it's supposed to turn on at 185 and it turns on to 195. that's the only deal and I checked it with the the temperature sensor for the fuel injection just to make sure that the gauge they're accurate and everything's reading right but just the fan is coming on at 195. so my theory of running 185 would have been correct but the fan comes on in 195. once the Fan's on it cools all the way down 175 right on the money every time turns off so that's how you fix any overheating problem you have you think this is a fluke we ordered the same exact radiator and we're gonna be putting it in Pontiac it has the same exact problem you know what I hate a Mustang it's a car that will not start in a car that overheats I don't care if it runs like crap as long as it runs and you got your whole family with it you're out cruising you're going through the desert on vacation your stupid car overheat and you have everybody asking you what's going on with the car why is it not starting is it broken there so big thank you to wrong Davis Racing Products my opinion dude I've had multiple Brands I think it's the best peanut butter jelly time you go get yourself some radiators

Channel: ZHP Garage

Views: 64,166

Keywords: How to, Cars, Car work, Mechanic, Master Mechanic, Classic Cars, Old School, Carburetor, Garage Restore, Restoration, Mobile, Fixed, ZHP Garage, Ziegler Garage, ZHP, Ziegler Racing, Street Car, Race Car, Drag Car, Car Shows, Classics, Fabrication, Welding, Overheating, 68 Camaro, Camaro, Chevy Camaro, Wiring, Ron Davis, Ron Davis Radiators, Painless, Painless wiring kit, Big Block, Small Block, Engine work, RestoMod, Aluminum radiator, Pro Touring

Id: hPqTju08dgg

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023