I had a 59 TR3 in the mid-1970's. I drove it for over 2 years all around
Savannah, GA, to Atlanta, GA (and all over there including up to
Gainesville, GA) for about a year and even drove it on I-95 from Savannah to
Delray Beach, FL (a distance of around 450 miles. The air temps ranged from
40's or colder in winter to high 90's in summer.
It never ran hot. I did not even know it was "missing" the fiberboard shroud
to the radiator until this past year when I saw such talk on this list. This
list was the first time I ever heard of such a thing. It had the stock fan
and all other stock items.
I don't understand why all the talk about running hot with TR3 etc. If your
car is running hot, it most likely has a cooling system problem such as a
crud-filled radiator or a slipping fan belt or a poorly performing (or
non-working) thermostat. The radiator cap was the stock 4 psi one.
Check for those things first and fix them if needed. Then, check the gauge
(I believe it works on the principle of expansion/contraction of the fluid
contained within the bulb and metal tube connected to the gauge.
A properly working cooling system should run all day at around the
temperature of the thermostat, or slightly higher (maybe around 10 degrees
to 15 degrees higher) if you are in very hot air temperatures and you are
moving relatively little or slowly (such as in very slow moving traffic). If
you wanted to get fancy you could look up the saturation temperature of
water with 4 psi pressure to determine the temperature maximum if you had
only water as coolant. The antifreeze mixture raising the boiling point, but
so does having a cap set for 4 psi. Armed with these data, you could figure
out the low and high temp values that would be the extremes of operation
(unless something in the system goes wrong).
Roy
'60 TR3 TS63103LO (in restoration)
techman@metrolink.net
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