Outside of brakes that literally barely worked, the next biggest problem with my car when I bought it was that if I took it for more than a 20-minute drive the cooling system would boil over when I got home and turned the car off. I decided the best approach was switching from the stock solid blade fan to an electric fan, and adding an aluminum radiator. I started with a 16" SPAL electric fan, a Vintage Air fan relay and adjustable thermostatic switch (that screws into the radiator in place of the petcock), and a new Edelbrock aluminum water pump.
When adding an electric fan you have to be very careful about the depth of the fan. I found that the SPAL 2360 CFM fan could pull the most air and was thin enough to work in my setup (or so I thought). Most high flowing 16" fans are much too deep to work with stock radiators. When I first installed the fan it barely touched the nose of the water pump. I had to take the pump to a machine shop and have the nose shortened a little to buy more clearance. Figure 1 shows the setup after having the nose shortened. A good cooling system flush, electric fan, and new high flow water pump made all the difference in the world. I could dial in the temperature at 160 degrees and the new setup could hold it there even in the summer months in Houston, TX. The bonus was there was a noticeable difference in the seat-of-the-pants dyno — close to a 30hp gain at the wheels going from a non-flex fan to having no fan.
The last step in my upgrade was to add a Northern aluminum radiator (see Figure 2). I sourced one from Laurel Mountain Mustangs for under $300. This radiator was considerably thinner than the stock 3-row that I took out (basically 1" thinner). This gave me the clearance that I wanted, and opened up other possibilities for additional electric fans. As you can see from Figure 3, the SPAL fan fits the Northern radiator perfectly. I got the SPAL mounting clips to hold it on and used some 2" fan shroud brackets to bolt the fan to (as shown in Figure 4).
