Help: thermostat install

[BenjamminsFiat]

See, that makes sense, Tulsa. I can understand drilling your thermostat if you don't want to wait the 45 minutes it takes to do the long procedure. It's just that I have read people's horror stories on this forum and others where they've spent Hours trying to get the thermostat and/or fan to work. And this whole deal with jacking the car up? I've only owned two Fiats, a '73 and now a '76 so maybe this is more of a major issue on the later cars?

Like I said, I'm new here, so I don't know enough to make any sort of judgement. But I did want to make people aware of this other procedure and provide some empirical evidence (glad I'm not the only one, Courtenay) that it's worked great for me.

I just posted a huge timing belt write-up in General Maintenance and am looking forward to everyone's comments/feedback. I thought I'd try to answer some of the questions it took me hours of research to find. An attempt to an "Ultimate Timing Belt" Thread

[courtenay]

Another of the things I have learned here is that if the lower rad hose gets hot, then the thermostat is opening as it should. If the fan still doesn't come on even though the temp gauge is reading almost in the red, the problem could very will be in one of the two temp sensors in the block - i.e. the one that tells the gauge it should "spike". It's the one with the black boot, or closest to the rad, or with the black and grey wire or any of the above. When I disconnect that, the gauge read as it should and since it hasn't warmed up enough here, the fan still hasn't come on because even with a 30 mile ride at 70mph the engine still hasn't gotten to a temp where the fan is needed! I live in the boonies, so I don't have a lot of slow, idle traffic to worry about.

[thefiatek]

The right way to bleed these things is fill it, run it with the cap off until the fan comes on, let the fan go off, top it off and cap it. That's how it was done at the factory.

[Jimbo]

Get rid of the bypass thermostat!