Tonight I swapped in a civic half radiator to replace the stock one that was having a bottom end tank separating. Well I get everything in and fire it up to wait for it to reach normal temp... Well, it never did. And It did the same thing before with the full sized radiator.

I'm not quite sure if there is a problem though. It is 45 degrees F out. Before I started having problems the temp gauge never hit the middle. It was always (about the beginning of the drawing on the gauge) below half. When the radiator started leaking and had leaked out most of the coolant the temp gauge would shoot up whenever I stopped but fall back down when I started moving again. When it did that I just added water since I didn't have the replacement in yet. Now tonight when I was going to bleed the system I'm pretty sure the thermostat never opened because the top hose never felt pressurized, and the temp gauge never got to the halfway mark. Also, I've never seen the main fan run. I've seen the aux fan run before though (usually when I was done driving it would run for a really long time after I turned the car off, relay?).

So my question is, could both the thermostat and temp gauge sensor be bad? Or am I just being paranoid? Oh, its a 91 RS. I also removed the non-working A/C and power steering today (including ALL the lines... my wrists and knuckles are killing me)

 

Probably the thermo....and dont get the autozone special because they are cheap pos that dont work. That plus OEMs are like $2 more at the local dealer anyway. Actually my temp sensor went out at the same time that my thermo went out.....weird ****, but it happened. I also learned not to buy cheap *** thermostats at that point as well.