John, What everyone else is telling you is right on the money. Without a dry duplication of what they said, below I'm posting a humorous account of my experiences of the same. It contains some nuggets of technical wisdom if you have the patience to read through it. I type about as fast as I talk, so I tend to get wordy. __________________________________________ One note first: In the unlikely event that your fan fail module really was working, when the fan fail light comes on and stays on this means you have a problem with one of the fans. Watch for problems with pins backing out or falling out of the relay sockets. The blue fan fail module can get hot, melt the pins underneath causing more problems. Bob Zilla posted a link to this forum yesterday directing you to some valuable illustrations on his web site. I had a similar situation as you the very first day of ownership with my DeLorean. I was on the other coast of Florida where I bought it getting ready to drive back home the next day. I was driving around checking out the night life when I noticed that the temp gauge was at 3/4 scale! I had been glancing at it every few minutes, so I knew that it wasn't hot for very long. When the fans failed, it got hot fast and with no warning light. I pulled over immediately and diagnosed the problem. While I was pulled over, a bunch of people came by and asked a ton of questions! Here I was first day of ownership during tourist season in a major tourist area all frustrated with my new toy with all these spectators asking me questions. I was too busy asking myself questions that I couldn't answer! One little old lady just had to sit in the car a while to "get a feel for it". It was great seeing the excitement in her face as she held the wheel pretending to drive. Am I off topic? Anyway, it didn't get hot enough to boil over, so I was relieved of that. I drove back to the hotel with the a/c off keeping a close eye on the temperature. Once it started to go up, I turned on the heater and rolled down the windows and that helped keep the temp down to 1/3rd scale. The next day (without any documentation other than the owner's booklet) I went diagnosing. With a lot of wire tracing and tugging on the wire looms to see where things went, I found that the problem was that the relay next to the blue fan fail module had dirty contacts and wasn't making connection. I made a fused jumper wire and replaced the relay with it so that my fans would stay on all the time. That got me home, and I used the car like this for a few weeks. Some kid followed me into a parking lot one day and told me that his dad has a DeLorean and bought his stuff from PJ Grady. So I looked them up on the internet and spent probably over two hours on the phone with Rob asking him a hundred questions and ordering a bunch of stuff. Toward the end of the conversation I could hear the urgency in his voice as he started talking like he was ready to wet his pants. I was ready to wet mine, too without a bathroom break for so long. :-) I installed a FanZilla, replaced the cooling fan breaker and that was the end of my electrical problems for a year. Since then problems have returned. I had the FanZilla installed laying too close to the breaker which got hot and melted the case. At the Memphis show Bob Zilla gave me a sheepish lecture on, "Did you read the instructions? They will tell you not to lay it against anything hot." He has graciously volunteered to replace the case on the melted Zilla for free. While the FanZilla was out, I made my own fan fail bypass and drove the car like that. It was educational seeing how the car worked this way. The OEM fan relay is BAD BAD BAD! Never use an OEM relay or one like it even if it came from a vendor unless you are sure that pin 87A has been cut or is missing! With this pin in place, it will short out your fans when they aren't running. When they switch off, the fans will still be spinning, so they work as DC generators. When you short the input to these motors, it wears out the brushes in them, forces them to run under load and stops the fan blades from turning freely. This reduces air circulation through the radiator. Bad Bad. I noticed that my fan fail light (which was now working as a "fan on" light) would slowly dim as the fans turned off. At highway speeds the light would have a faint glow to it because it was being powered by DC voltage generated by the cooling fans. We were curious why Tom's car didn't do this, so we checked the wiring and found that the relay was shorting out the fans. What where those engineers thinking? This might have been necessary to stop the fan fail module from giving a false reading. I bought my relay from Radio Shack (off all places) and it was a SPST, so pin 87A was already cut. After Tom fixed the relay in his car, his cooling fans spin so freely now that at 100mph the cooling fan light stays on bright even when there is no power going to the fans. Instead power is coming FROM the fans. I'm sure that most people with the fan fail bypass still have the shorted fan problem and don't know it. While I was still using the car with the FanZilla, I realized that I had the cooling fan breaker in reversed polarity. I turned it around the proper way and nothing seemed to change. (It was still running a lot hotter than it should probably because I damaged it from the reverse polarity.) Then after running with the fan fail bypass, this breaker got even hotter and started cycling. It was getting hot before as it melted the FanZilla case, but the Zilla cycles the fans at a slightly less duty cycle due to the staged on/off sequence. I since replaced the breaker with a John Hervey one, and that one runs cool. The moral of the story: Don't install those breakers the wrong way. It is easy to do. There is small print on either terminal that says, "BAT" for battery and "AUX" for auxiliary. You want to be sure that electron flow is going into the "AUX" and out of the "BAT". Walt To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: DMCForum-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
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