Thread: American know how.

As far as I know,, all V8's left the factory with a 96 deg thermostat,, so temps over 100 are common here.

Originally Posted by ozscott

Yep the stock temp guage is idiotic. The D1 was better but not great.. It would seem the average driver gets worried to see the temp guage fluctuate. I have cooked my 4.0 at 120 on the Scanguage before the dash needle moved.

Is it easier to bleed air from the heater matrix with the inline stat set up?

Cheers

I never had any problems with the factory setup and the converted style was no problem at all. I let it idle for almost an hour and it never broke 183. Heat and blower on high, loosened the purging valve screw when it hit 180. Pulled the front tires up onto curb and let it run another 30 mins like that and tweaked open the valve again for good measure. You do have to drill a 1/8 inch hole in the new stat and orient the stat into the housing with the hole on top at 12 o'clock. This is supposed to really allow any air bubbles to escape past and then straight out of the valve. Some guys have positioned the valve first before the thermostat housing on the top hose assembly using the excuse that there is not enough room to place the housing first and this is completely untrue. The housing needs to come first directly after the water outlet pipe above the alternator pulley. It sits fine there. The purge device comes next and then hosing to radiator. Everyone has been piecing together a few sections of hose to make the loop back to driver side of the radiator but I found that a length of the flexible stainless steel hose will accomplish the task in extraordinary fashion and look professional to boot.

You need this hose.. It's the 48-inch kit with reducers/hose adapters, finishers, and stainless clamps from Classic Industries number S7311

1-1/4 inch inline thermostat housing by Meziere, part number WN0071

Glowshift brand 1-1/4 inch water-temp sender

Stant Superstat 180 degree high-flow, Chevrolet/GM style thermostat with 1/8-inch hole tapped and oriented to the 12 o'clock position in housing

TruFlate 21-555 petcock or 1/8-inch valve of your choice to use as a bleeder with the 1-1/4 (32mm) glowshift adapter. You can purchase a Glowshift temp gauge to install here after the air is purged out.

All of that was for the upper conversion. For the lower, you either remove the lower 1-1/2 inch radiator hose from the "Wye" and install Gates hose number 23405, for BMW.

OR, you can leave the stock bypass hose (with the big loop to upper stock Tstat) on the water pump and connect it directly to the stock 1-1/2 lower radiator hose with a barbed or threaded coupling. Here is a pic of both. I'd have had a hard time removing the clamp holding bypass hose to the plastic Wye, so I left it be and coupled it to the radiator hose with a 1-1/2 poly spa coupling from the big-box store up the street. I felt like there was too much tension having stretched the bypass hose down that 4 inches to the lower rad hose but there is no fault in performance or function but when I install the upper flexible/stainless radiator hose, I'm going to remove the short barbed coupling and switch to a longer 3-inch "nipple" type which is used in plumbing. The spa variety of couplers are barbed instead of threaded like pipe so they work perfectly for coupling radiator hoses as they come in different diameters. The top hoses are 1-1/4, lowers are 1-1/2.

Pic of 2 lower hoses being couples together with 1-1/2 spa variety from Home Depot