Radiator: $230. Water pump: $30 ish. Rockauto. Can probably get the radiator cheaper locally.
Radiator: $230. Water pump: $30 ish. Rockauto. Can probably get the radiator cheaper locally.
Three row aluminum radiator which is supposed to fit and cool up to 600hp. $200. Extra capacity for turbo?
Champion Radiator
That should work too. You do live in Texas... so some extra capacity can't hurt.
Ok, one last round of checking things before I order parts.
First, I did the hot water test to make sure that my temperature gauge was accurate and I wasn't really just fine. Gauge is accurate. Damn.
Then I drained the coolant and pulled the radiator and flushed it. There was some rust and such in the bottom, but it seemed to flow just fine. Put it all back together with new coolant and ran it. Still hot. Damn. I let it cool down while I did a few other things and then pulled the thermostat as a last ditch effort to see if coolant was actually circulating. With the thermostat out coolant rushes through the radiator. I took it for a drive. Cruising temps are 190 and parked idling temps are about 195. So it cools, but this isn't really a solution. What's going on here? I know the new thermostat I put in opened because I tested it. I installed it in what I think is the correct direction, with the spring facing the engine. Is my pump going? Maybe it can't push enough coolant when there is a restriction in there but it does fine when you take it out?
The good news is the cleaning I did on the carb yesterday seems to have cured the part idle stumble. The car is incredible at a 55mph cruise. It feels like you could drive it all day without a hiccup. The bad news is that the accelerator pump is leaking a bit and no amount of tightening things helped. Time for a rebuild kit I suppose.
The second bad news is that I left the camera on the roof when I went for a drive. The good news is that I found it. The next bad news is that the screen on the back is broken and you can only see about 1/3 of the screen. The good news is that my wife wanted to replace it anyway so now I have a shop camera! Yay!
Fergus got a bath too.
I do really like the gauges. I can't decide if I should paint the gauge panel or just live with the hacked out of a microwave look. 
Just an offhand guess, but maybe you had an air bubble in the cooling system that you exorcised?
Is the block full of rust? Pull the block drains and flush. Also possible the pump impeller is just worn down from corrosion.
I don't know if the block is full of rust, but rust is probably an issue to some extent. The coolant was rusty. A new water pump is $39 and will be at the parts store tomorrow morning. Somehow this is the first water pump I've ever changed. Should be fun.
Man, I LOVE this car and this thread!
I keep imagining the beautiful noises ol' Fergie makes. Any chance of a video or sound clip? 
I could try. It has stock exhaust manifolds and tiny exhaust tubing with s big muffler. It kind of sounds like an old truck, because it is kind of an old truck. I really really want to find a set of long tubes that will fit around the steering box. I don't need headers, but I kind of need headers.
The water pump would be the next logical choice. I agree with your theory the impeller may be corroded to the point where it can't push coolant past the thermostat restriction.
Headers and duals could be a double-edged sword. Yes, it'll definitely sound cool, but may add undesirable droning when cruising on the hwy. Headers tend to add resonate noise at various RPMs. Isn't the potential use for this car to be long family cruising trips? IMHO, have an exhaust shop fab up a dual exhaust set-up using the existing manifolds and see if that scratches the itch well enough. They should be able to do it for a few hundred bucks and the same system can be connected to if you decide to get headers anyway.
Many years ago whilst driving my 390 F-100 up I-75 on a particulary cold evening, the truck suddenly overheated like crazy. I made it to the next exit and called a buddy at the dorms to come get me. I was sure I'd blown something up. The next day we went back to get the truck and I pulled the thermostat at the truckstop where I had landed. The thermostat was a solid block of ice.....open, but solid up with ice in a system that was a solid 50/50 coolant/water mix. In Georgia, not Wisconsin.
I threw a new thermostat i it and it was fine until I sold it several years later. None of which is any particular help to you, other than to say the factory cooling system wasn't the most efficient. While you're making the effort, I'd flush the block and radiator out with one of the flush kits. Scale and surface build up can really handicap heat transfer, but I'd still bet the WP is the main issue.
In reply to Ian F:
That's probably the best bet. Every time I have a truck with loud exhaust pass me on the freeway I wonder how he can deal with the noise.
I moved Fergus to the garage today for the water pump replacement. Having a garage to work in is pretty cool.
I suggest having the radiator boiled or replacing it. The radiator on my lemons Fiero looked fine, flushed clean but the car still would overheat. We ended up strapping a second junkyard radiator to the roof to finish the race. Eventually my teammate replaced it and cut the old one open and it was 80 percent clogged with E36 M3.
mazdeuce wrote: The good news is the cleaning I did on the carb yesterday seems to have cured the part idle stumble. The car is incredible at a 55mph cruise. It feels like you could drive it all day without a hiccup. The bad news is that the accelerator pump is leaking a bit and no amount of tightening things helped. Time for a rebuild kit I suppose.
Has that got the little motorcraft two barrel? If it does the accel pump is super easy to change. I've had to replace a few on cars that otherwise ran great and avoided a full rebuild.
In reply to Cotton:
That's the one. So you can just replace the accelerator pump? I did not know that. Good info. Thanks.
In other news, I just picked up the new water pump with the 911. If a car could be smug, I'm pretty sure it was smug. The pump seems to be raw metal. I should probably paint it before I put it on, shouldn't I?
In reply to mazdeuce:
Yeah, you can replace it with the carb on the car....there is a little cover right on the front of the carb. I replaced two on some mustangs that had sat for way too long. Those are great little carbs.
I really love how the car runs except for the hot part. It runs better than half of the fuel injected cars I've owned.
It is amazing how nice a carb'd engine runs when everything is "right." My GT6 and Mini will start instantly when warm. Even when cold they'll start pretty quickly with some choke and a few cranks.
Ian F wrote: It is amazing how nice a carb'd engine runs when everything is "right." My GT6 and Mini will start instantly when warm. Even when cold they'll start pretty quickly with some choke and a few cranks.
Same here with Dad's drag cars and Mom's vette - they don't even crank over, they just start. very well behaved and driveable and everything. If all carbs stayed tuned like that we might never had had fuel injection.
A late 60s carbed car runs so damn good because nobody cared much about what it spewed out the other end. That and with a carb, there is no delay or priming, as soon as air flows through the carb there's fuel in the cylinders.
Kenny_McCormic wrote: A late 60s carbed car runs so damn good because nobody cared much about what it spewed out the other end.
My 78 T/A is the same way (quick to start and smooth running) and those cars still have to go through emissions in a lot of places, so your argument doesn't really hold water.
Any way you cut it, the car starts and drives great and has the best throttle response of anything I own, including the 911. I've checked and re-checked the timing and it's set to 6 degrees initial with the vacuum detached. It jumps to 30 when you plug it back in which is right where everything says it should be. When I pull the water pump I'll take it apart to see what the guts look like. That will give me more insight into what's going on.
It looks like I found a source for the missing trim around the rear window. I don't have it in my hands yet, but I'm really excited. Finding parts for an unloved car like this is a bit tricky.
Had a few minutes so I pulled the smog pump. There was no belt on it because it's seized. It's not pumping anything. In an ideal world I'd pull each of the 8 little air injection spots in the head and plug them properly. In this world, it's likely that I'd break off at least on of them. I think I'm just going to cut off the hoses that go into the air injection manifold thingy and plug them. There is a lot more room free on the front of the motor with that gone and I had to pull it to pull the water pump anyway. 
Cotton wrote:Kenny_McCormic wrote: A late 60s carbed car runs so damn good because nobody cared much about what it spewed out the other end.My 78 T/A is the same way (quick to start and smooth running) and those cars still have to go through emissions in a lot of places, so your argument doesn't really hold water.
They have to go through OLD emissions, with huge converters, smog pumps, etc. to make up for the engine itself. Anything with a carb will respond instantly because there's nothing to add delay, now how well that instant flow of fuel is metered and atomized is why we have EFI and DI now instead.
Fergus has been missing some rear trim pieces since I got him. It looks like someone pulled the trim from inside and outside the rear window in an attempt to get the tailgate open when the glass wouldn't go down. They didn't put the trim back on and it got lost. No only didn't I have the trim, but I didn't even know exactly what pieces I was missing.
In a GRM like turn of events, I mentioned this to Vigo when we were talking about him taking the last of my turbo Dodge pieces. He used some internet ninja skills, made a few calls and set me up with a guy who had a 67 wagon in his junkyard. Some emailing and a few pictures confirmed that 67 and 68 share the same rear trim. Not knowing exactly what I was missing, I just had him send it all, inside and outside and I'd sort it out. Today I got a big box with this inside.
Some test fitting on the car confirmed that the pieces are correct and there are at least three pieces that I didn't know about, so I'm happy I had him pull it all. Of all the aestetic problems with the car, the missing trim bothered me the most, so finding it is a really big deal. Thanks to Vigo and thanks to Bob at Owens Salvage.
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