HELP car overheats

[180fan]

if you pull the thermo, your engine would remain cold and chances are your mileage will go to crap. reason is that the ka's have a warm up feature, when the engine is cold, there's more fuel dumped to warm up the engine faster. Your idle also gets bumped up if you hadn't noticed. The higher idle, and more gas = worse fuel economy. When you've got $2+ for gas nowadays, that's alot of money.

Additionally, you've not yet fixed the real problem. Pulling the thermo is a solution, but not fixing the root problem. My bet is that the system hasn't been flushed properly in the first place.

the way I do my coolant jobs is like this. 1. mix 50/50 coolant with distilled alhambra water (some distilled water brands have salt added to the water which coats the inside of your coolant passages) also make sure your heater is set to HOT2. unplug the coolant bleeder screw, you can find this from the yellow sticker that says never open when hot3. fill through radiator until coolant comes out the bleeder hole cap bleeder hole and radiator. 4. squeeze radiator upper hose and shake the front of your car up and down. 5. refill radiator and recap6. start car and keep squeezing upper radiator hose with cap off and fill.7. stop car after running for another minute or so8. recap radiator and repeat 4-7 until your radiator can't hold anymore.

Thermostat install, make sure the little hole thing is at the top and seal with silicone gasket.

While you're changing anything on your coolant system, you might want to check over your coolant hoses. Check for cracks, small leaks, etc. I found a small leak from my upper radiator hose when my alternator was going out via a drop of painful coolant in my left eye. It might be a good idea to swap those out if you don't know the age of them or if they've been there for a while. My hoses were the original hoses from 89 so um...yeah...and I changed them last year.

[gc8936]

Is your car running good without the thermostat. Do you have a good clutch fan.

[cstang68]

I've been running w/o a thermostat for 4 months now. It just takes 10 min to warm up instead of a coupla min. It's pretty warm here in socal tho.