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1968 mustang overheating issues

1K views 7 replies 5 participants last post by  DC Pony 
#1 ·
Hey guys, well, I'm having trouble with my 1968 inline 6 over heating. I used to not be able to to drive the car more than 10 minutes without it overheating completely. So I went through and replaced the water pump, thermostat (installed 180 degree thermostat), new thermostat housing, new radiator hoses, new 2 row radiator, and new overflow tank, and It's got the original 4 blade fan on it. It'll do fairly decently now, but if I'm on the freeway for too long without any traffic, it'll get real close to H on the gauge. If I'm driving through the streets, it also goes to hit H pretty quick, especially on hot days. But for the most part, it'll stay at about 3/4 of the way to H on the gauge. Any ideas of what could be wrong?
 
#3 ·
If it's not loosing fluid by boiling over, then yeah change out the sender as mentioned. Or test it, it should read about 40-60 ohms when hot.
 
#4 ·
Could be a defective stat. Have you boiled it to see when it opens. Bought one from autozone and ****** ass part so I boiled it in a pot with a temp. gauge, like the ones you use for checking temp. of meats, well the stat was not opening till 205 and should have been opening at 180-190. If you have a mechanical temp. gauge, you can also dip the sending unit in the pot to see if the temp. correlates with the thermometer. Or you can get a IR gun and see what temp. its reading when car is running then correlate this with the temp. gauge.
 
#7 ·
The sending unit for the temp gauge should go in the thermostat housing correct?
I am not sure of that. I have never owned a '68 or a 6-cyl but the Ford drawing shows the 6-cyl temp sender mounted in the head. Its the part number 10884 shown at the very back end of the head in the attached drawing.

You may well just have a sender problem making the gauge read too high. That is almost to be expected with the senders sold today for the V8 cars. The center of a Ford temp gauge was about where the thermostat should open. The upper end of the scale was meant to be around 250F which is where the antifreeze solution starts to boil. An IR temperature gun is the easiest way to measure what your engine is actually doing.

A 180 F stat starts to open at 180; it won't be fully open until around 200 F or even a little higher.
 

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#6 ·
Not sure about 68 since I have a 65 V-8, the temp needle is at about 3/8 of the gauge when I am at operating temp. Did you boil your stat? or run it w/out the stat just to test to see if it will overheat. If it does not then the stat is defective. Did you buy at Autozone?
 
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