[T3] Thermostat Air Flap

[John Jaranson]

On Jun 23, 2011, at 7:25 PM, J. Jonik wrote:

>  Having spent most of the afternoon working on hooking up the thermostat and the air-flap rod and so forth...it's finally all installed. Haven't yet put back the tin and everything though...pending any advice here.
> 
> Using small needle nose vice grip pliers to hold the tiny circlip to shove it onto the flap rod end...that worked.  Almost easy, despite hard to reach.  Small mirror and flashlight help...and a magnet to find lost circlips, .      BUT things aren't right.
> 
> The thermostat is mounted below and screwed all the way onto its rod. Doing that brings the flap-rod, above, as close as possible to where it anchors to the assembly.      BUT...to get the rod in the anchor enough to tighten the little bolt, the flap ends up almost all the way open.   According to Bentley, it should only be open a fraction of an inch.
> 
>  I'm assuming that when adjusting all this, the engine is cold (though its in upper 80s today), and the thermostat is in most-compressed state.   It expands when heated, right?  
>     But the thermostat takes up all the up-and-down space in its bracket.
> Where can it expand to?   Is that top extension (with the hole to screw into the rod) supposed to ride up and down in its notch as thermostat temperature changes?  As it is, it can only go down.
> 
> Another ominous problem (besides flap rod not being long enough) is that the spring is too long...by about an inch.
> 
> So....maybe the question is....Is this the right thermostat and assembly for a 72 standard engine?    I have a 73 parts car out back. But I'll bet there's no thermostat etc there to look at.   
> 
> This is all new turf...having only removed  thermostats and the rest from every T 3  I ever did engine work on....wiring up the flaps, of course.    Never installed one.   I'm searching Samba...but nothing helpful yet.

IIRC, the thermostats fail in the expanded state.....so that if they fail they open the cooling flaps fully.  In the cold state they should be compressed and full about 2/3s of the bracket height.

I forgot about the pictures on my tech pages of the thermostat set-ups.  There are some differences between the dual port and single port set-ups.  Check it out here...

http://home.comcast.net/~jaransonT3/jaransonT3/LatestNews.html

You might have to scroll down a bit.  Click on the pictures for slightly bigger versions.

Later,
John Jaranson
www.carartbyjohn.com


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