rad and coolant

[Wouter de Waal]

Hi all

I've been thinking about this radiator/thermostat thread (Yes, that's what
that burning smell is :-)

Firstly, I have two cars, a Land-Rover (hardly hi-tech) and a VW (air
cooled), so:

When the engine is cold, you do not want to circulate coolant through the
radiator, but you still want to circulate coolant through the engine. This
is important, it gets rid of local hot spots. So you have a bypass, and the
coolant circulates around the block. On the Land-Rover, if you remove the
thermostat, the bypass *and* the route through the radiator is active, with
an unknown percentage of the coolant not going through the rad. So your
engine runs hotter. The thermostat is essential, even if you rip out the
guts to make it into a '190 degree' or whatever equivalent.

And this would be dependant on the engine design, some engines would
obviously be more susceptible to radiator bypassing if you remove the
thermostat.

W