New Rad And Thermostat Fitted -

[Atari Boy 11]

As above really, whilst at the ring in May my 89 1.6 GTi started to suffer from overheating problems. The car still drives okay although it doesnt really like traffic as you can imagine. The temp gauge reads at about half way across the dial, maybe up to two thirds. My local garage looked at it and apart from quoting £200 suggested that the radiator and the thermostat were replaced.

I have changed both of them over for new ones this morning and now the fan does not kick in. Whilst idling on the drive the temp gauge read half way.

What should I be looking at? There is a temp sensor that we have now screwed into the side of the new radiator, and a weird metal cylinder thing that is simply clipped on to the back side of the rad at the top, near the slam panel. The wires for each come from the same loom, but dont know whether they are connected. What is the cylinder thing? It has a three-pin plug on the loom side, but only two pins on the actual device. The plus seems to fit both ways. Help.

 

 

Any advice and guidance would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

Jonny

[Paintguy 0]

I'm not the most technical of people, but a few suggestions:

 

The cylinder thing you mentioned is a resistor that controls the speed of the rad fan. I'd make doubly sure that it's connected, and the switch on the radiator too. There are usually two of these cylinders, the other one is for the headlights, so make sure they haven't got mixed up.

 

But maybe the new rad is cooling the engine sufficiently well for the fan not to have been needed, hence why it didn't come on. Bridging out the pins on the plug connected to the radiator switch should activate the fan.

[silent_running 0]

OK I am now about to have a crack at Jonny's 205 so I might as well get involved here. It's just had a long run and temp was holding nice and steady while on the move, pretty much dead on the half way mark. I'm sure before the overheating problem it used to run at the bold 1/3 water temp mark. Only at standstill idle does it creep up to 2/3 temp. The rad and thermostat must be working because the rad stays cold for a few minutes then suddenly goes hot, and there seem to be no air locks.

 

I just need a better idea of what goes where. So have I got this right - the screw in sensor in the side of nearside end-tank of the rad is the fan switch that triggers the fan at a certain temperature? And the cylindrical thing is a control resistor for the fan? Where is the water temp sender for the dashboard gauge? I wonder if we've actually fixed the problem but still have a faulty gauge sender? The reason I say that is that oil temp seems perfect, roughly on the 1/3 mark and nowhere near overheating, making me think that if water temp was higher than normal, oil temp would follow.

 

Help!

[pug_ham 244 3 Cars]

The sender for the water temp gauge is on the back of the head on an 8v, behind the distributer towards the bulkhead.

 

The cooling fan wiring loom only runs between the battery shunt box, radiator temp switch, resistor & fans. It's a totally self contained loom.

 

Graham.

[silent_running 0]

Great, should be easy enough to track the fault down then. Cheers!

[pug_ham 244 3 Cars]

The attached pictures shows the senders you are looking for at the back of the thermostat housing.

 

IIRC the smaller one with the red on is the temp sender & the larger (green) one the temp warning switch.

 

Graham.