It feels good the successfully fix your own car problems. Lately with the triple-digit summer heat, my Corvette's been almost overheating quite a bit. The coolant would slowly climb past 260° F and start boiling just from driving around town for any amount of time. Having the coolant changed and filled properly didn't help, the fans were working, and nothing was leaking or broken, so I did some research online.
Apparently the air induction system sucks in air from the front, bottom of the car, making it act like a vacuum cleaner as you drive down a road. As a result, all the dust, rocks, grass, fur, etc. you drive past gets sucked into the radiator, which also has a smaller, more efficient design with thinner fins inside of it (basically, a race-car design). In other words, not only does the radiator get gunked up, but all that stuck up debris affects it much worse than it would affect a standard radiator.
So with some help from my dad, I spent all day trying to pull out the radiator, cleaning it, and then putting it back in. The whole thing's inside this plastic shroud with the air filter on top of it, and it was pretty easy to remove except for these impossibly placed metric-size screws in the very front down where you can hardly reach them and where there's no room to really get to them with any tools. Those six screws took over an hour to remove, possibly two, and we couldn't even get them back in. Leaving them out didn't make much of a difference though.
But boy what a difference cleaning the radiator out made. There was a lot of gunk stuck inside of it, and some of the fins were bent too. I straightened most of the fins out with a really tiny flat tip screwdriver, and we blasted most of the gunk out of the radiator. We even soaked it in soap for a few hours to loosen everything up and I blasted it a second and third time.
Now it runs a lot cooler, even in this hot summer heat. The coolant temperature still gets pretty hot when I'm stuck idling somewhere after driving around, but it stays under control and manages to go down once the engine starts cooling.
