Re: [DMCForum] Chock one up for the heat
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Re: [DMCForum] Chock one up for the heat



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


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