This weekend I got my Hooker Long Tubes installed in my car.

During tear down of the stock stuff, I attempted to unplug the coolant temp sensor in the driver's head, and ended up breaking the grey plastic part that holds the wiring on.

I bought a new coolant temp sensor from O'Reily's. It looks the same, but with a black plastic wiring clip instead of grey. The rest of the sensor looks identical as well.

We installed the new coolant sensor and went on with the header install. We got the headers installed, the coolant topped off and everything.

But letting the car run for a few minutes causes the temp gauge on the dash to read over 210* and yet the heat blows cool air, indicating that the gauge is wrong. The cooling fans were not running.

I think that either the sensor is too far into the head and blocking a passage causing excessive heat build up, OR I didn't get the cooling system bled well enough..

Does anyone else have an idea?

The engine has run for less than 5 minutes at one time.

 

my car ran hot after my old slp header install. had to set the fans at 180 degrees and put in a 160 stat. that fixed it.

you have a 160 stat.. what about the fan settings?

Drive it down the highway and it should be no more than 180 degrees.. when its 70 degrees out

 

I have a 160* thermostat.

Low speed fan turn on is set to 171 and high speed at 191...

Before header install, the car would get to *maybe* 180*.

This almost has to be either a bad sensor, an air pocket or I have the sensor too far into the head.

 

ttt

anyone else?

 

I am guessing there is still air in the system.Get it on ramps and try bleeding it again.

 

Lee I would bleed it again. Also after running it, pull the cap and the level should have gone down some if there is any air in the system.

If the level is too low, the heads will be "dry" the heat will blow cold and the temp sender could read high because the heads would not be cooling off.....but that's speculation the sender might not read very well off air alone so it might actually read low or zero with no coolant on it.

Did you scan it and see a difference between the gauge and the PCM reported temp?

 

No chance to scan it yet... I will this evening though. I'm going to move one bundle of wires on the passenger side and then spend the rest of the night (if I can) working on this coolant thing. I'm afraid to run the car long enough to get good and hot for fear of burning those wires...

I'm leaning toward air pockets I just wanted to get other ideas as well if there were any.

 

I had the same problem with a ****ty pep boys sensor.. turned out the sensor was just 30 degrees off or something. I drove around for a while with a scanner hooked up to monitor the temp of the car. Maybe just get a sensor from the dealer. I ended up just putting in an auto meter gauge.

 

for like $4x you can get an autometer guage with sensor.

 

I'm not interested in an Autometer temp gauge for my car. I'm not looking to add ANY gauges to my car right now, that's just not my style. But thanks for the tips!

However, I re-bled the coolant system tonight and logged the car and it seems fine. I let it run 10 minutes, Autotap showed the coolant temp reach up to 174, then back to 169 by the end.