Postby Hasbeen » 26 May 2017 02:00
It sounds like your problem was ignition, & your are now burning all the fuel producing more heat, rather than some of it going through unburned, producing no heat & taking some of the heat with it out the exhaust pipe.
In good condition 7s do not have an overheating problem. Mine is producing near the high end of a standard 7s power. It can run through our 35 C days driven hard, or in stop start traffic, running the air conditioning, & never get above 3/8 on the gauge. With m gauge that is the water coming out of the engine at 91c.
I suggest you get an infrared temperature gun, & FIND OUT what temperature yours runs at. They are only about A$20, & you will then know what your car is doing.
When I bought it mine was getting a bit hot, with no aircon. I found it had about 30% of the radiator blocked, with no coolant flow at all, when tested with the infrared gun. The sections of the radiator at & after these blockages was 40C cooler than the rest when running.
If you can't afford that IR gun right now, drive the car, stop & stop the motor, then run your hands over the radiator immediately before the heat spreads. It won't tell you as much as a IR gun, but enough to know if your radiator is partially blocked or not.
I fitted a new stock radiator, & a new thermo fan, when the aircon was fitted. It has never overheated. In retrospect I think I wasted my money on the fan. A friend grabbed my old one in an emergency, when his had it's bearings start to collapse. The thing is still cooling his car perfectly 3 years later.
On the other side, my 8 had a cooling problem for quite a while. It is computer controlled injected. We ultimately found it was tuned too lean at low revs, small throttle openings. Once we richened the mixture in that low speed area, all overheating disappeared. This is not likely on carbs, unless some previous owner has fitted the wrong mixture needles. Not likely, but stranger things have happened with some POs.
Hasbeen