Bruce,
> The more I look over the car the more confused I get.
Can't answer any of your questions about model year. Mine's a '72, but it's
faaaar from stock. The POs hacked it, I hacked it...
> Also, I was stuck waiting in line for the drive-through teller and I
> noticed the engine temperature starting to approach the red line of the
> gauge.
> How else can I improve the cooling
> of this beastie?
I've never tried electric fans. Some people say good things about them.
I have 9.5:1 compression with no enhancements to the cooling system, which
makes me pretty susceptible to overheating. But I've never had any
problems. So you should be able to keep yours cool with no problems.
I do have an oil cooler, which they say helps quite a bit. The oil stays
*hot*--much hotter than the coolant--so if you can cool it off, that goes a
long way towards keeping everything else cool. Besides cooling the oil, the
cooler adds a couple of quarts to the oil capacity, which gives you a bigger
heat sink. I bought my cooler from TRF, and I've been satisfied with it.
Careful how you route those hoses, though--I chafed a hole in mine once by
running it across a steering knuckle.
When adding the oil cooler, people say it's a good idea to add a thermostat
to the plumbing; the theory is that too-cool oil is as bad as too-hot oil.
I use a good quality multi-viscosity oil (20W50 most of the time), and
that's good enough for me; but if I'd known about the thermostat and one had
been readily available, I probably would have put one on.
People also say that remote filters are a good thing to add with the oil
cooler--with this arrangement, there's no oil filter hanging off the block.
You put, say, 2 oil filters in a row somewhere in the plumbing for the oil
cooler. This makes changing the oil easier and it also adds some redundancy
to the filtering; as dirty as these engines are, this seems like a great
idea. Again, I didn't know about the mod and I still don't know where you'd
buy the hardware, but it seems like a great idea. It's a matter of how much
time and money you want to spend now to avoid rebuilds later.
But anyway, about keeping it cool:
-- make sure your timing isn't too far advanced. This has caused me
overheating problems in the past. You don't hear the initial stages of
pinging/pre-ignition, but you do suffer the heat buildup it causes. You may
be too far advanced and not realize it. What do your plugs look like?
-- make sure your mixture's not too lean. This also causes overheating.
Again, check your plugs.
-- check your voltage stabilizer. You may not actually be running as hot as
you think (or, you may be hotter than you think...). A faulty voltage
stabilizer makes the temp and gas gauges read too high or low.
-- check for cracked head, cracked block, leaky head gasket. You don't want
to know about these, but they're deadly. The first way to check is to have
a radiator shop check your coolant for exhaust gases. (There are probably
DIY kits for this, but I couldn't tell you where to look. A radiator shop
shouldn't charge much for it, though.) If no gases show up in your coolant,
you're probably OK. If they *do* show up, you probably need to pull the
head and have it magnafluxed. If no cracks are found, I guess you'd put it
all back together and hope it was just the gasket. If the problem persists,
it's probably a crack somewhere in the block. If so, you can often have the
offending cylinder(s) sleeved. You're into a full engine rebuild at this
point, though, and you might rather find another block.
Good luck!
Kevin Riggs
'72 TR6
rkriggs@ingr.com
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