Think I’d try a good clean n flush, based on the majority of the opinions above! Might save you some clams in the long run.
I had my radiator re-rodded for less then $100.
xr7g428:
Bill, You have the right reason, but they wrong location. Let me explain.
Guys that work on lots of cars see cars that over heat because they have no thermostat installed. The common belief is that the water circulates too fast ans doesn’t have time to cool off in the radiator. The part that is true is that there is a circulation problem, but is is in the engine, not the radiator. The thermostat does act to restrict flow, the purpose is to insure that every coolant passage in the engine is always filled with coolant. If an area does not fill, then it gets hot and when coolant hits it, it flashes to steam. The hottest part of the engine is the top end: the heads. Water wants to seek its own level, and stay low in the block.
There are two other reasons why it is impossible for water to go through the radiator too fast for it to cool off. First, the rate of heat exchange is a function of the difference in temperature. Hot moves toward cold, and the bigger the difference, the faster it moves. If the radiator is almost as hot as the coolant, it could stay there all day and never cool off. If the radiator is cold, the greatest amount of heat transfer happens very quickly. This is the concept that you have to get your head around. It isn’t how long the coolant stays in the radiator, it is the temperature difference that counts. If you drop a burning coal into hot water, it cools off almost instantly. Hot water in a cool radiator does the same thing. The closer in temperature the coolant and the radiator become, the slower the transfer rate. So if you don’t have enough air carrying the heat away, and the radiator gets hot. The car will over heat.
Then there is the hardest part to get your head around. In a closed system, the faster the coolant flows it still spends the same percentage of the time in the radiator. This is why guys buy high volume water pumps. They want the water to make two trips through the radiator in the same amount of time as a regular pump. Think of it this way. If it takes 30 seconds for your stock pump to circulate 4 gallons of coolant through the system, the coolant will spend about 25% of that time in the radiator. If the high volume pump can move the coolant twice as fast, then the coolant will pass through the radiator twice, in 30 seconds, but it is still spending 25% of the time in the radiator. And the biggest cooling bank for the buck happens the instant that the hot coolant hits the relatively cold radiator.
These are not my opinions, just physics.
I did some thinking and what you say makes sense. I think the lack of time theory was started way back by who knows who and was bad info carried on in the trade for decades. I can see how it has carried on so long because we can’t see inside of a running engine so an overheat caused by a missing Tstat was a mystery and not enough time spent in the rad was the easy answer. BTW I found some great info on cooling systems while I was pondering this problem. Web Page Under Construction
Bill
Bill, The thing is, if the time in the radiator thing was true, it would look exactly like what we see. So it makes a lot of sense that people would make the assumption. No disrespect intended. Great link!
I don’t think you’d need anything bigger than the factory radiator. They work fine when the rest of the system is working properly and they’re not plugged.
That’s a good link that really distills a lot of information to a readable and understandable series of bites.
