One other things that a lot of people overlook also are fan blades. Fan blades are all plastic these days with the metal center hub for mounting. Always inspect the blades after you've done a water pump or any kind of repair job, and make sure that they are all there, number one. Make sure that there is no tips missing, that's common and they should be relatively flexible.
When they started hardening and things of that nature, or you see little ends missing, what you want to do is replace the fan blade, because you got to remember a slight little missing end piece also throws the blade out of balance and it's hard on your fan clutch and your water pump bearing.
The fan clutch is something that you also want to pay attention to is when your vehicle is running that fan clutch with the fan blade or with the vehicle off, but after it's warmed up that fan blade should have resistance when you turn that motor. When you turn that fan blade, it should twirl maybe twice, and then it will come to an abrupt stop, because what we need to know is that this fan clutch is actually having some resistance in order to turn that blade.
One of the last pieces that we're going to look at and inspect for where it's going to be the radiator. Now radiators like to leak right along these joints right here, where the aluminum radiator cord is crimped on to the tanks. Here is an old ring seal inside there, and then the factory just has a large tool that just crimps all of these pieces down and creates a seal. When these items heat cycle a few times, it has a tendency to happen is that the aluminum expand slightly and you'll see slight little bit of coolant leakage coming down these tank joints right here.
Look very carefully on both sides if you can, it might take taking the upper, it might require taking the upper fan trout or a piece that's covering off the top of the motor, but what you want to do is inspect that very, very carefully. Another thing that you want to watch is any kind of cracks along these yokes right here, along these necks where the hose is attached. They have had a tendency to also to crack right off at the radiator, and if your particular vehicle has a coolant tank on it like this and that coolant tank show signs of having expanded, you'll see that it actually bulges on the side, or any of the tanks on the radiator bulge out. That means they have heat cycled so many times that they are actually fatigued at this point.
So what you want to do is kind of inspect your cooling system as a complete system, because any one component leaking is going to jeopardize the rest of it. If one piece of the system leaks, the car runs hot and it fatigues all the other pieces when it overheats aside from the engine.
So what we're going to do here also is look at the radiator itself. This is the cooling system, this is the cooling surface of the radiator. What typically will happen is debris or water, the coolant will flow into the top of the radiator cycle through to the bottom and then across. If you get any rust in your system, that rust will have a tendency to sit at the bottom, it's a heavy item, it's metal. So what will end up happening is it settles at the bottom. As the rust accumulates, it will start blocking off these tubes, and if you start losing these cooling tubes, you start losing the efficiency of your radiator. So a good idea is to flush the cooling system annually. Make sure that you've got clean coolant in it. Make sure that there is no evidence of rust.
Flushing out a radiator these days is difficult because most of the aluminum tubes inside, they will also have cooling fins. Those cooling fins act as a filter and they'll catch debris. And flushing an aluminum radiator is very difficult because this solution that's required to clean them is -- it has to be relatively mild so it doesn't eat through the aluminum, it's not like the old brass radiators where they can use a relatively caustic material to heat out the debris, if you use too much caustic material in here, or fluids, what you'll end up doing is eating up the aluminum all together, so these are disposable items.
What you're going to do is figure a radiator last about 5-6 years, if there is no leaks involved when the car starts running at a higher temperature, you can't seem to explain why that temperature keeps coming up in the summer time, when you got your AC on, there is a good chance that the radiator has blockage, and it's not efficiently cooling anymore. What also happens is calcium builds up from the cooling system inside these tubes, and it decreases the cooling efficiency of the radiator, and what you'll end up having is a vehicle that runs constantly hot.
As that vehicle runs constantly hot, you're also jeopardizing your automatic transmission if you have an automatic transmission vehicle. If the vehicle runs over 200 degrees, 220 degrees, that transmission fluid is not being cooled correctly. So you're not only doing damage to your engine, your cooling system, you're also jeopardizing your automatic transmission.
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