My first car had a lovely, circular radiator repair job that was exactly the diameter of the bolts on the fan blade. It must have thrown a bolt at some point.
The placement of the dents on all the fins reminds me a bit of that. Looks to me like something broke off, got wedged under one of those stabilizers, smacking the hell out of every single fin on the way before it was finally thrown clear.
This. There was a great video posted on HN a couple years ago, by one of the few guys around who tunes up these old radiator systems. Apparently a lot of them were quite genius in design, but years of neglect make them not work very well. Was a fascinating video to hear him talk about common problems, and the amount of troubleshooting and problem solving involved with making these radiator systems work as designed again.
This is more like you replaced the exhaust system with something bought 3rd and reflashed your car with a 3rd party CAN bus widget, then complain when it overheats and has a flat zone around 3500 rpm.
Cars are like people. Sometimes a quirk is normal, and sometimes it means your bottom end is gonna fall out. Gotta get regular checkups and hope you catch it in time.
I had this same issue last year. I bought a replacement fan for around $200-250 online and just did the job myself. It was kind of an awkward repair since you have to squeeze into the cabin and work on your back, but I did it with a ratcheting driver, torx bit, and extension in about 2 hours.
Online Saab communities are awesome and common problems usually have step-by-step instructions from others who have done the repairs, most even have pictures.
I've had pretty good luck with my Saab. It's on '04 with 140k miles and that blower fan has been my most expensive unexpected repair.
Gulp 4 because, grr, excessive breaking changes from 3.9.1.
Also how to fix my car. I'm currently refreshing all the coolant pipes since once ruptured the other day. It's not that hard, but some of the pipes are difficult to get to, and I'm procrastinating about disassembling essentially the entire front end of the vehicle in order to be able to access the radiator and replace pipes attached to it. I've already replaced the ruptured pipe no problem but, since all the pipes are the same age, I figure it's only a matter of time before another splits.
A while back, the car I had had a bad blower motor. I looked it up, found a video that showed where and how to replace it. I got the part online and was able to do it myself.
It was a fairly simple replacement too. The motor was actually situated under the dash on the passenger side and was about as difficult as installing/replacing a computer fan.
There's a few tricks to know for each model. I got a mid 2000s ford with a by all accounts unbreakable engine (600hp possible on stock internals) but the radiator and trans cooler is the same unit and often cracks pushing coolant into the trans. First thing i did to it was to buy an aftermarket external trans cooler for my specific model and install it.
I have a 2000 civic. The thermoswich went bad and I replaced it (bit of a bother, tried to do it fast while coolant was pouring out the opening).
Couple years later it went bad again (I probably put in a crappy one from a generic country) so instead of going through that again I just stuck a bent paper clip into the socket of the wire that plugs into the thermoswich. Now it always has the fan on when the car is on.
Could have gotten the same effect by tampering with the relay (this short that I added actually just activates the relay for the fan) but I went with the easiest option.
If you like watching amateur YouTubers rip out their hair chasing electrical problems, I recommend checking out Tavarish and Samcrac. It turns out cheap flooded auction cars have tons of those
Too late to edit the original but wanted to add, this is a 2017 Ford Expedition and all of these problems have existed since I bought it in late 2017 (except item 3, which started in December of 2019).
Nope, it's still just a bucket of bolts kept running but just barely. It's now got a paperclip under the hood to keep the rad fan on and a couple of functional nickels under the dash as part of the breaking system.
I'm pretty sure I saw a guy lift out a large vertical rectangular object from in front of the engine, fairly early in the video. When it was put back in, he reached way down in between it and the engine, like maybe he was re-attaching the bottom hose (presumably without a hose clamp, or any fluids). But I could be wrong, I only watched that part twice, and I wasn't concentrating on the radiator.
This is type of thing I've seen Eric O. over at South Main Auto[1] fix in dozens of videos. Mad troubleshooting skills, works hard to find root causes of things. He's pretty amazing, hidden away in some no-account town in upstate NY.
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