Can anyone help me or atleast tell me where I should start in diagnosing my problem? My 428's water temp was always running 220-225 and I thought it was too high, so I wanted to start with changing out the thermostat (had no clue what was in there). It turned out being a 160 (there was a 160 stamped on the center) and I swapped it for a 195 (only thing in stock at the time). Well apparently I didnt seal it well enough and it slipped out of the housing while drivng, and I watched the temp keep on going up to 230 at which point i pulled over on the highway and shut it off. The gauge kept going up to 240 and I opened the hood to see coolant squirting from around the waterpump. Towed it to the local garage and had them swap out the tstat for a restrictor plate (his idea) and put in a edelbrock high flow water pump (my idea...thinking it would reduce the normally high 220-225 down 10 or 15 degrees).Took the car out on the open road doing 55ish. Took about 3 minutes for the car to slowly reach 180, then remained at 180 for another 3-5minutes then the temperature semi-quickly raised up to 230 at which point I arrived home and shut her down (no boil over). I switched out the restrictor plate for the original 160 t-stat (and made sure there was a good seal) and had the the same results. I have a Griffin radiator, puller fan with shroud (I have a manual fan switch), an inlet shroud ( I didnt have this originally and probably should have started with this to reduce my high temp problem) and now the front air is completely flowing through the radiator,
oil cooler (manual switch), timing is low 30's. Puller fan is going in proper direction and isn't losing power at high rpms. The water pump pulley is slightly smaller than the crank pulley, but i have no idea what size the original water pump pulley was. I have an overflow tank that is working properly, expaned coolant goes into tank when hot and sucks back into radiator when cool. Running 50/50 with water wetter. There isn't any white smoke when I start it so that rules out a major head gasket blow, but not necessarily a small one, which with my bad luck, is exactly what I have. Any thoughts?
Ryan