Tuesday, July 10, 2007

A CB radiator in a RB?

As my car is a 1977 model, it should have electric cooling fans and not a belt driven fan. The cooling fans would be on the front of the radiator in a pair and would be "pushers". The car should also have an expansion bottle for the radiator. Take a look at the pictures and you'll see something is missing.

So what is going on? Well the previous owner told me that the car had been in some front end collision. This resulted in the front end being worked on a little. In the process it looks like the radiator was replaced with an earlier model - one for a chrome bumper (pre 75 car). But it doesn't stop there. In addition the electric cooling fans which are standard on this car were removed and a belt driven cooling fan was added.

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The car runs pretty cool which is good although could be due to an overactive thermostat.
I checked the temperature sender by disconnecting the wire and grounding the end of the sensor wire. This should result in the temp going to H, which it did. So at some point I will need to check the thermostat. In the short term though, the current setup seems to do an effective job of cooling the car.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The belt drive fan will probably be robbing the car of horsepower...

Rich said...

Yes, thats probably right. The later models had electric fans which is what this one should have. I'll probably convert it back to electric at some point.