Blueprint 408 cooling system questions.

Johnny Mac said

Yes. They are drained. Otherwise they would rust in the bag.
What fan/shroud is on it now?
What is "not much better?"
You say above it was hitting 180 on gauge with tstat open before. That's normal...with a 180 stat. T stats are junk anymore. I have replaced way more than I should have had to in the last few years.
Did you drain the heater core either time?
Could be lots of gunk in there.
When is it hot? Idle? Cruise? Always?
Does the fan generate enough suction to hold a playing card to the radiator?
Pretty vague on many, many factors/scenarios.
We can all take stabs at it, but need a little more info to be more help.
What's your timing at?
Vac advance?

Click to expand...

Ok so the coolant wasn’t actually brown. It was starting to get dark outside and it looked brown. I put a filler cap in the upper hose because I thought it was too far above the radiator and when you shine a light in it it’s orange. The radiator did make it run about 5-10 degrees cooler. It also seems to take longer before it gets hot. The car basically runs hot at all times. If you take it out early in the morning when it’s cool the temperature stays around 190-200. I’m running a mechanical advance on my distributer, it’s the msd 8388 I’m using I think the blue springs with the black stop bushing. At idle it 16 degrees, and at 4K rpm, at 34 degrees. The full advance doesn’t kick in until it reaches 4K rpms. Another thing is it also tends to diesel when I shut it off after driving it for a while. If a let it idle for a minute it before shutting it off, it won’t diesel.