well i just bought a 88tc, very proud of myself untill i actually got it. drove it home about 30miles and i parked it, started over heating, seems that both the radiator fans wouldnt work, and the person wired them up diffrently, instead of running from the engine, ran on a diffrent line going to the ignition switch, i'm guessing. i was wondering if it would be a good idea to replace the fans and run a switch for them? hot off the battery, or should i hook them back up to the orange stripe cable and the other one and see if they work
Welcome to the board and congrats on your new car. The situation is probably not as bad as you think.
Hook them up as original and then test them. You can always hook up a manual switch later.
The passenger side fan is the primary. It should run for a couple seconds each time the engine is started. It should also run whenever the A/C compressor runs. It should come on when temps reach about 210. The driver's side fan is the secondary. It comes on if temps reach about 220 and the primary has run for 10 seconds. It will also come on during A/C operation if a/c head pressure gets real high. Get the car hot and see if anything works now that it connected back in stock configuration. If the fans don't work, see below.
You can test the fans, the wiring and the two fan relays as follows. On the lower intake inbetween the middle two injectors is a sensor, ECT (engine coolant temperature sensor. Take the electrical connector off of it and jumper across the connector. Start the engine. If both fans run, that means that the fan motors and wiring are good and so are the two fan relays. If one or both don't run, then it's a motor, wiring or relay problem. You can check the fan motors individually by running 12v to them straight off the battery.
Assuming the fans run when the connector is jumpered then the problem and they don't work otherwise, then the problem is probably with that the ECT sensor between the fuel injectors. You can pull the codes from the engine computer and see if you one for the ECT but it can be bad and not always throw a code. There are articles in the Technical Articles (off the home page) about pulling codes. The other possibility is that the ECT is OK but the coolant flow past it is blocked. If you stand on the driver's side and look at the bottom of the lower intake manifold you should see a fitting pointing at the driver's side fender with a hose attached to it. This fitting can become clogged as can the hole it screws into. This stops flow past the ECT such that it never "sees" the hottest water so the fans don't come on. Most of the lower intakes I've seen are 50 to 90% blocked.
Work through the stuff above and let us know what you find. Good luck.
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88 TC X 2, 86 SVO, mods list at
http://www.turbotbird.com/showroom/pd_88tc.htm