electric fan: much easier w/o engine?

[BerniniCaCO3]

yeah, I just got a new radiator last summer, $100 @autozone for aluminum/plastic. I'm not really in the market for one, and it works just great, but I was surprised that so many people found 3 cores. I'd looked last summer and didn't find any.
For my heater core, though, I spent the extra money on the brass one: I don't want to have to change that EVER again!

on the mark viii fan, there are 3 wires. Ground was clear. Which of the other two is for the high speed and which is for the low speed?

[P72Ford]

i think we used an 85 police car radiator for it. Its a 3 core. I have one of those in my Towncar and it required extensive trimming of the Mark 8 fan to make it fit. I gave up on that and just fitted a stock fan back to the car. I'd imagine with a little bit of tweaking of the brackets and the rubber blocks down on the bottom, the radiator could be moved forward to take up for the extra thickness, making that a non-issue. I probably ought to consider doing that on the Towncar because my mechanical fan is shoved into the shroud a little bit more than ideal.

Yeah, I'm guessing its the '85 unit; its a 3 core brass. etc unit. Really nice piece.

When I went to put the mechanical fan on, I had to trim the shit out of the shorud to clear the PS pump pulley; I also had to notch the bottom quite a bit. And the result is that it fits, but the fan is too close to the radiator; the blades should be roughly half inside the shroud, half outside for maximum air flow.

The dual fan set-up is nice though. I am building some new, lower profile mounts for the fans, and I bought a new harness. I don't know what happened with the old harness; whether the power was disturbed, or what. It looked like one of the relay connections got hot/ melted; I tested that the fans still worked, and they did. I wanted to drive the car, and a mechanical fan swap was the easiest way to get it going.

The new harness has a threaded temp sender though, which I like better than the probe. Fortunately, the t-stat housing I bought has a beautiful provision for the sender.

[1987cp]

yeah, I just got a new radiator last summer, $100 @autozone for aluminum/plastic.

Not bad! I did beat that price once, by getting a used Al/plastic unit that'd been used for two months and the car croaked.

Incidentally, the Al/plastic one I bought new, I got probably back around '99 or '00. Granted, I usually drive like an old dude and don't put that many miles on anything, but it's still in use and doing fine and has already lasted almost as long (in years) as did the original it replaced.

on the mark viii fan, there are 3 wires. Ground was clear. Which of the other two is for the high speed and which is for the low speed?

Easy to determine which is which with jumper leads and a spare battery. On my Taurus fan, I was actually confused at first; took a little switching back and forth to realize one of my intended configurations was running the fan in reverse! Took some more fiddling to verify that I was switching between two speeds in the same direction, and that it wanted the low speed disconnected in order to properly engage high speed. IIRC, the solid black lead (remnant of stock wire on the stock plug) was ground, and the small (middle?) one was of course low speed. The colors are different now because I soldered new wires directly to the terminals.

In these shots, green is high, black is low, and yellow is ground. Annoying and unscientific, but I like saving $ by using junk I have laying around! BTW, that black lead is hardware-store stuff ... very large strands make it inflexible and the jacket is thinner and harder than automotive stuff.