"Charlie" has Overheating probs- Here are my Clues and please chime in with opinions!
I tried telling him this by asking if he still had that factory pos fan, which he does....
but no reply.
people skip the most obvious sht sometimes, I mean..a 4 bladed fan???? come on????
and no shroud???
You are correct in pointing out that I can and will make a simple problem and solution more complex than it is- I do think too much.
Your reply: I do not want to put a large, multi-bladed electric fan on this car unless absolutely necessary. And, it shouldn't be necessary.
What I am trying to do- and what everyone has been giving me help and advice on here (again thanks for all that have expressed an interest), is to make the darned car work as it was originally designed to do.
Feller, all I am is a pilot by trade- all the training that I have for auto repair comes from some native curiosity and a lot of self study.
It also helps in this case that I have literally been driving a 1967 Plymouth Barracuda for 41 years and 314 k miles.
Ma Mopar engineered enough air gaps in the front of the car to adequately channel enough air for cooling through the radiator- and nothing has been changed about that.
Ma also designed and installed "just enough" radiator, shroud, fan, pump, etc. into the cooling system to make it reliably cool in all seasons and driving conditions. Me, I have seen my bone stocker get hot sitting still in traffic with the A/C on, so I modified it to turn off the compressor while keeping the fan working inside. . .I never had it get hot on the freeway unless I blew a hose or something. That one was a smallblock v-8. The only other things I did over the years was a flexfan and took off the shroud- it was busted anyway.
In my opinion, and Only my opinion, the fan and shroud is a good implement to have if you are sitting at a light with no wind of motion through your radiator. There may be some improvements in forcing flow thorough more parts of the cooling fins with a shroud while sitting still, but it is not necessarily crucial unless you are making a heck of a lot of heat in your motor. Perhaps a big block makes more heat than a smallblock- or a slant six and needs those cooling aids quicker. I just always found that my cars would warm up while sitting and cool off while moving- and I would just make sure I didn't sit so long that they would get hot.
This is a second '67 I picked up last year (see posts and pics). I got her working reliably. . . and now relatively suddenly, she isn't. Something about that slant six changed so that now it is putting more calories (heat) into that water jacket and overpowering the cooling system- one that has been improved already by a much larger capacity radiator. It isn't overheating quickly either at idle or at speed- but it does overheat eventually, and no combination of speed and power usage stops it once it gets past the halfway mark. So, either the motor is putting out a bunch more heat than designed suddenly- or my cooling system has been compromised somehow.
You guys and gals are helping me track down what changed. It is a mechanical contrivance, engineered to work reliably. It should be fixable with just the gear it came with.
The other mods I can and will hang on my other one when it comes back out of body and paint- but I will be doing so to lose performance robbing hardware off the engine, not because the thing will need that gear to run at proper operating temperature.
Again, appreciate the insights from all of you.
