Fan Installation

As many of you are well aware the TII radiator with the stock fan does not allow for the use of a normal size oil filter in any of the L-bodys. That is why the GLHS came with the stubby filters. I had a 14" parts store fan on my Omni for a couple of years, but at SDAC 18 my car overheated on the way back from the drag strip because the wiring on the fan was internally faulty. Perhaps the reason that the car has been running hot in 90*F  temps the last year and a half is because the fan was not running at full speed due to this electrical fault, but regardless it was time for a fan upgrade. The New fan flows at least 600CFM more than the last one, and will be pulling on a much larger portion of the rad than the last fan. I have reused the shroud that I made for the last fan. I just opened it up to accommodate the extra 2" in dia. The fan came with a nice pig tail and connectors to hook it up. Since my wiring harness is not the most cherry one on the block, I took the opportunity to cut off the old connector as far back as I could go and spliced in the new one with the supplied connectors. The blue wire on my pigtail was spliced into the green wire for the fan, and the black matched up with the black. Make sure that you read through the directions, as miss wiring the fan will cause it to become a pusher fan rather than a puller and you will wonder why the car wants to over heat, but cools down well over 55MPH.


Parts list:

Qty: 1   Flex-a-lite fan #116  Jegs PN: 400-116  Cost: $110.23         
Qty: 4   1/4" nylon lock nuts with 1" 1/4 bolts   Cost: Reused from last fan





I had already cut the shroud to fit the radiator, so I used some vice grips to hold the fan to the shroud while I drilled a couple of 1/4" holes for my bolts to go through. Once I had those in, I moved the vise grips and did the other side. I noticed once I was done that I could really only get the bolts on the passenger side of the car to fit between the core and the shroud without rubbing. the end tanks on the rad. In the traditional pragmatist's way I decided to RTV the fan to the shroud and use a couple of zip ties for extra measure on the drivers side. This worked quite well.



There we see that the shroud is not all that thick. It's not fancy, but it did make a difference with the old fan, and it sure was a better way to mount the fan than to use the zip tie like things that the fans always come with.



I took out one of my trusty pain pens to outline the fan on the shroud.



It's not pretty, but it works. I did go ahead and use another color paint pen to trace about 1/2" in from my red line so that I would know where to cut with my tin snips. That turned out really well, as the fan had a good "seal" around it, and it looks as professional as something made next to an old broken toilet can be!



It's a tight fit as always, but I can actually slide the fan in and out with minimal troubles once I remove the two bolts in the rad.




This shot from above shows how nicely the fan fits. You can't really see the oil filter, but it does look like it will just eek by the fan for oil changes. If it doesn't I have a pretty good amount of the fan mounting tab that is right there which can be ground down for some more clearance.