Hectic

alright, i don't know how detailed i should get but my escort has some strange cooling issues. first off, the fan has never worked since i've owned it. i hooked up a light switch between the battery and fan for a temporarry fix. when the switch was hooked up, the temperature guage would skyrocket sometimes, not because of the coolant being hot but because of an electrical issue. a lot of the time, turning the engine off and back on would make the guage go back to the normal reading (pointing to the "O"). after i while, i just decided to disconnect the fan from the battery and rely on motion to cool the coolant in the radiator. as soon as i disconnected the fan, the temperature guage would act normal and give me a true reading. it has been about 4 or 5 months without having the fan attached but just the other day, things went haywire again. i was driving and noticed that the temp guage was exremely high but i had not been driving very long and was moving the whole time. so i turned the engine off and attempted to turn it on again to make the stupid guage read normally but i got nothing when i tried to start it. it acted like it would if the clutch pedal wasn't depressed. it didn't even try to crank the engine. all i got was the click of the relay or whatever when i turned the key. i finally push started the thing (i love manuals) and drove around. then the guage was going completely crazy, flying all the way up to the highest it would go. i didn't want to stop the car again and get stuck so i turned the key real quick to see if the starter would crank. well it did and the temperature also went down to normal. i drove around for 15 minutes on the freeway and around town and it stayed in the normal range. i then came back home and tried to start and it started. since then i have nad no starting issues but the temperature guage has decided to be stupid. it's a crap shoot if it will read wrong or normally. when it reads wrong, the stop/start engine solution works but not always. i really think this is an electrical issue. my top radiator hose is hot, the radiator is hot so i think the coolant is flowing properly. i need some advice, i'm a pizza guy and i can't have my car overheating. a couple questions: is the cooling fan switch actually the fan relay or does the sending unit also switch on the fan? i have a haynes manual but there's nothing about the location of the fan switch. i want my fan to turn on and i want my temp guage to read correctly. someone please help if you can. thanks

 

nay27uk

sounds like an earth problem.
Remove all earth's you can find and clean them up you may need to scratch some back with sand papper. This should solve your problems

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REGARDS NAY

Hectic

thanks...what's an earth though?:p here's something wierd: as i said, the problem stopped for a nice chunk of time and appeared again. well, since looking at the temp guage is second nature now, i know for a fact that the problem immediately surfaced again a few seconds after i filled up at arco (cheap gas) a week or so ago. i noticed it as soon as i turned on my car and started to drive away. i always get my gas at arco cause it's cheap. it's been reading inaccurately constantly scince i filled up that day. well today i was running out of gas so i stopped at a shell station. all day today it was reading high temps but immediately after i got the shell gas in my car, it read accurately and did for the rest of the day. i'm stumped on why it would be caused by gas but from what's happened, it really seems like the arco gas could have been the cause...we'll see.