After all the cooling shenanigans this past week, time came to remove the radiator from Ike to be rebuilt. After pulling the hoses, the “liquid” that came out was the consistency of chocolate milk and had a nice bright orange rust color. After a little while of finagling, the fan shroud was discontented from the radiator and the radiator came out along with the shroud. Running water through the radiator revealed my problem this past week. Water flowed much faster out of the hole the water was going into than out the opposite side. Somewhere in that mass of metal there is a blockage preventing the coolant from properly flowing through the radiator to exchange the heat from the engine block.
Then came time to remove the thermostat housing and thermostat from the top of the block. It took a little while to get the three bolts off of the housing, and what was inside was kinda shocking. The gasket between the housing and block, what was left of it anyway, had petrified. The thermostat was “held” in place by a shocking amoun
t of what I can only call “something.” The housing also will need to be cleaned up a little more so I can decide if it needs to be replaced or if it will clean up well enough to be reused.
After all the external cooling system was released, the block needed to be flushed out. a hose in the top of the head it is! Nearly 15 minutes later of continuous water flow, the exiting water turned clear. That’s a lot of crap! Then, with all that extra room in the engine compartment, another pressure washing was in order. Apparently the block was painted blue at some time in the past. I could also see for the first time that I think the pulling on the end of the crank shaft is the wrong kind. It looked more like a double pulley M-38 style part, rather than a CJ-3A part. However, it could also be a double pulley if there was ever a governor installed. Since I have neither a M-38 nor do I plan on ever installing a governor, I’ll probably look at replacing it with a single groove pulley in the future. 
So what’s next? Now that the radiator has been removed I can go and get it rebuilt. The fan shroud has some surface rust, but is still usable. I’ll have to either find some way of blasting it or spend a weekend scrubbing it with wet/dry sandpaper and getting it down to bare metal. I’m also going to replace all of the very rusted hardware connecting everything to the cooling system. I’ll be sifting through the parts book to get everything perfect. I have a feeling that the cooling system will look far newer than the rest of the engine compartment soon, complete with fresh black engine paint 🙂
Nice.