The fan is about an inch away from the radiator now. I never got a chance to see if it ran hot before. I just got the car. I started fixing various things getting it ready to start driving it. The thermostat housing had rotted and had a hole in it so i replaced that. When I was working on it I flushed it out and noticed the water was moving slow in the radiator like the core was stopped up some. When I got everything back together and took it for a short drive the whole top tank started leaking. it was at this point i decided not to mess with a 42 year old radiator any longer.glad your happy with it,how close is the fan?Was your car running hot before?
Since the factory shroud no longer fits and you are going with electric fans, you can get the fans attached to an aluminum shroud. They are fairly affordable and work well. Without a shroud you could still have overheating issues. I'm not a fan of my electric fans in my Cuda. You can hear them turn on and off over the engine sound. Make sure your fans match the air movement you need.
I have checked into the shorter clutch. It is nowhere near 2-3 inches shorter. its more like a half of an inch shorter. There is not that much space in there in the first place. The factory setup is pretty shallow already.Perhaps you can replace your existing fan clutch with one with a shorter hub, either a Mopar clutch or a Hyden clutch to move the assembly back 2-3 inches, enabling you to use the shroud. Remember its not the thickness of the the core but the heat exchanger's surface area (fins per inch) that does the cooling not the number of tubes. When the fan and shroud are utilized, ALL of the radiator's surface area is the hest exchanger not judt the area in front of the fan.
BOB RENTON
Looks like a great fit, I'm sure Shroud would install easy as well. Perhaps if it was painted black it might not stand out as much. Thank you very much for the update, I really appreciate it, My 79 has a 451 with cleaned up TFS240 heads and solid cam and after driving a while it gets hot to the point of boiling in the overflow bottle LOL!!! so a rad like this is neededI am still running without a fan shroud. Even on 100 degree days it does not overheat. 180 thermostat and it has never gotten over that temp. I will also say I am not real fired up about the way it looks but at the time this radiator was the only one I could find in stock that was a direct fit. all the other factory style radiators were special order with no definite lead times. For the price and convenience this was hard to beat.
View attachment 1121132
^^^^ Agree but buy radiator paint thats made for doing radiators.
thanks for the recommendation I never knew that there is specific paint for radiators^^^^ Agree but buy radiator paint thats made for doing radiators.