Today's main goal was to change out the fan clutch that I just replaced a few weeks back. There were three options for my van: severe duty, heavy duty, and heavy duty w/o heavy duty cooling.
The first time I went with simply 'heavy duty'. The clutch stuck out from the nut an inch or two, which my original did not, but seemed to be no issue with that. Well, that clutch stayed engaged too much. It made my van sound like a jet taking off and really zapped my horsepower too. In fact when I'd first start out in the van it would be crazy loud and I'd have to floor it to get the van up past 20mph. Usually by the time I got up to 45mph, or sometimes half a mile to a mile down the road you could hear it finally disengage and it would quiet down and I'd have more power. It almost acts like a transmission problem but it's not (though I do have one of those too).
This time I went with 'heavy duty w/o heavy duty cooling'. The clutch is right up against the nut like my original one, even though the rest of it looks quite a bit different. I'll give it a week but the initial engine start ups have not had the roaring fan at all, which is hopeful.
With the fan and fan shroud off I decided to take a look at my heater hoses. Specifically, if I could find the hoses that supposedly went to the rear heater core. I took a heater fan out of the back of the van months ago and I thought that's all it was. But there really is another heater core back there under the van, in with all the AC stuff. I blocked all of that stuff off from the interior when I took that heater fan out. The hoses that went to my front heater core just had two simple Y's in them. I got rid of the Y's and ran the hoses straight to my front heater core. In the process the bypass tube that was connected to one side of the heater core started leaking on me. The o-ring had a scrape on it, no clue how or why. All it needed was a new o-ring but the tube with o-ring is only $10 so I got a whole new one, and it gave me a chance to buy 4ft of new heater hose just to make myself feel good. That hose that went to the bypass tube was a tiny bit short without the Y in there too.
So, everything is back together. I still have heat. The fan clutch sounds good so far. And I no longer have coolant traveling 7-10ft of hose to the rear heater core, that wasn't used, anymore. Someday I will remove those lines completely from the van, but for now I just made sure they were completely drained.
With any luck, I'll soon be installing some new slightly ghetto curtain hardware and making myself some curtains out of left over fabric my dad got from his work.
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