Another thing that needed fixing was the cooling fan. As I'm discovering, there are some nice parts on this car, installed not so well.
Such as the $700 aluminum radiator with a nice $200 17" electrical fan,
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installed with a one-inch gap to the radiator core, allowing most of the fan air to blow out the sides:
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I could have just made new mounts for the fan, but the fan is currently triggered by nothing better than a manual switch. I pulled the efan off to save it for the eventual LS swap, and bought a flex fan to install.
Of course, it wasn't as simple as that. Despite the near $grand spent on cooling, the PO filled the system with water. What was in there when I popped the cap might have come from the Mighty Missisip for all the clarity it had. So, clearly, a coolant flush was also in order.
Putting it all back together gave me a clean front, and a new fan behind:
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I still need to make a shroud.
I also pulled the billet steering wheel and replaced with a clean, if generic, 3-spoke wheel. Critically, this wheel has 4" of dish, where the billet wheel had next to 0". I have long arms but it was quite a reach for me to the old billet wheel.
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Time to polish up the billet parts and put them up on CL. Hopefully somebody's building a ZZTop tribute car...
Because when you spend a silly amount of money on a silly, trivial thing that will help you not one jot, you are demonstrating that you have a soul and a heart and that you are the sort of person who has no time for Which? magazine. – Jeremy Clarkson