Pure Stock-1995 Olds Achieva

[Robert Swartz]

Well it's time to fix the problems we've discovered. It's often interesting what a little digging and research can reveal. It appears these little Quad 4's are quite durable. This was my step son's car and he had driven it quite a bit. With the fan not working, it never overheated, threw any codes or puked any fliud? Apparently there are two temp sensors on these engines, one for the temperature and another for the fan control.

I'm going to hook up a seperate fan controler and run it thru a switch, that way the car can be driven as normal. Or we can manually run the fan in the pits.

Have a whole pile of new parts for this car. I was digging in the corner of one of my boxes that holds old unused or discarded parts. Lo and behold I discovered an old pair of never used 2" Sun gauges, both an oil pressure and a mechanical water temperature gauge. The boxes looked pretty bad. I'm not going to hook up the oil pressure gauge, not sure I want see that just yet, on this old motor anyway. I do want the temp gauge. With the nature of these engines, seems they do repond to temperature changes, as others on this board that run these small cars have informed us. Tested the temp gauge after Tod told me to boil a pot of water and see if it reacted. It ran right up. These things are probably 35 years old, guess they weren't a bad buy after all, LOL!

I'm going to put the sensor into the water stream in a hose. You can get some real nice aluminum hose adapters. After studying these for a few minutes. Most of these only have holes drilled for 1/8" npt threads. Did find one that would accept an 3/8 fitting. A trip to the hardware store and being somewhat resourceful, I made an adapter out of pipe fittings. It ain't pretty like the aluminum ones, it will get the job done. Didn't have to pay shipping to get it here.

A tach and temp gauge, a race car do not make. These little tools will give us some better undersanding of what the car is doing. Maybe help us to improve the times of the car, when we get the opportunity to take it back to the track. I purchased one of the Autometer tach adapters, I am being cheap, only got one of the Jeg's 5" tachs. If I do sell the car later this year, I can leave it in if someone wants it. Or recycle it to something else down the road. Hopefully it will be adequate for this car at this time.