thermostat

[supernaut]

what temp thermostat are you guys running on your daily driver rigs that also see trail time? I see 160-205 available. My current thermostat opens up at 1/4 up the temp gauge. I wish my 350 ci '75 k5 temp gauge had numbers instead of just lines.

 

[roadnotca]

180 deg. on 1985 350 ci., four row radiator.

 

[rick88blaze]

195* '88 K5, 350tbi, 4.56 gears on 33's.

 

[onlychevy6]

195* 75 blazer with 350, 4.10 and 35's

 

[K5Chris]

only 195 with tbi. wont go into closed loop with anything lower.

 

[supernaut]

I found that 195* was stock in my '75. I'm going to stick with that. the more I read the more i find that you want to get as much heat as you can in the cylinder's without causing pre-detonation or overheating problems. Apparently this is to make more power. sounds good to me!

I thought I was getting ahead of the game with a lower temp thermostat. Now I believe it would have been a shoddy excuse to not make sure my cooling system is in tip top shape. I may even experiment with a 205 and see how my cooling system reacts - if i can get that much closer to the threshhold, without going into pre-det etc... then it's like free torque and horsepower, right?

 

[supernaut]

on a side note this is all related to replacing the radiator. I started to pull it and found my trans cooler line fittings to be frozen to the lines. No amount of WD-40 seemed to help. I'm going to cut the old lines up by the radiator and use rubber trans cooler line to make the connection between the old metal line and the new metal fitting/line.

The parts dude mentioned that the aluminum line was used because rubber lines couldn't stand up to pressurized ATF back in the day. Does that sound right?

 

[dyeager535]

Aluminum line? Everything I've ever seen was steel. Using dissimilar metals ensures the parts will never come back apart the way they were designed. If they are aluminum, I'd bet they are a PO mod.

GM didn't use aluminum because it fatigues easier than steel, the dissimilar metal issue, plus it melts at a heck of a lot less temperature.

 

[73k5blazer]

190

 

[Thunder]

195 is best the for MPG and all around driving.
If you want a better performance go with 160 and advance the timing as far as it will go with ot pinging at WOT.
180 is a good compramise between the two. You can run a little more advance, and still get Ok gas milage