TVR Vixen - Cooling System

Simple jobs aren't

When I bought this car several of the hoses looked perished so I wanted to replace them all and I wanted to do it in one go. I thought this would be straightforward - and that just shows how wrong you can be.

David Gerald supplied a bottom hose but their top hose looked nothing like mine. I measured the heater hoses. They were half inch diameter - I measured the other ends just to check. They were five eighths. I got a heater control valve to change one of these to half inch and a scrap yard provided a half inch fitting for the water pump.

The heater control valve came from a Land Rover Series III (Land Rover part number 90577299). I looked under the bonnet of a neighbour's to check the valve was right but when I got the valve I realised why it was missing from my car. It couldn't be screwed into the inlet manifold (not standard) as the valve fouled the carburettor mounting flange. Fortunately I had noticed on the neighbour's Land Rover that the valve was mounted on an extension piece which would solve that problem.

That only left the top hose - I worked out that the standard hose wouldn't fit as the thermostat housing had been changed for one with a switch. Further investigations (getting muddy in the scrap yard) showed that you couldn't use the standard hose with a switch in the thermostat housing. I decided to try and get the switch in the radiator to work so I took it out ( with difficulty - the fans had to come out first) and heated it in a saucepan on the kitchen stove with a thermometer. It came on at about 96 degrees - so it worked after all!

I decided to use the standard (Capri) thermostat housing and the original Otter switch so now I could get the top hose from David Gerald.

It took me three months to assemble all the parts I needed for this job and about an hour and a half to do it. It still wasn't finished though as when I took the thermostat housing off there was no thermostat.

This was the final peice of the jigsaw to make sense of it all. The previous owner - misled by the defective temperature gauge had tried various measures to try to make it run without the gauge showing it overheating.

The cooling fans looked as though they would cool a much larger engine - two BMW motorcycle fans mounted in a specially made cowling which was such a tight fit it was straining the radiator filler neck. I sold them to someone to use in a Taimar and got another from a Rover 620 in a scrap yard. Some months later I fitted it to the original brackets but meanwhile I had no trouble in driving without any fan.

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