2011 Ram 1500 Truck Radiator TRQ RDA83126

Hey friends, it's Len, down at 1A Auto. Today we're going to be working on a 2016 Ram 1500 with the Hemi. We're going to be doing a radiator. It's going to be a fairly simple job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. So if you need this part or any other part, you can always check into 1A Auto. So we've unboxed our radiator, quality 1A Auto part. What we want to do first is we want to compare it to the one that's inside the vehicle. Just kind of like a preliminary check essentially just to make sure that everything kind of lines up where it should be. Once we get the old one out, we'll do a much closer up check, make sure everything's exactly the way it should be. But basically we just want to kind of make sure that we're dealing with the right part before we start tearing everything apart and then you're down a vehicle without a ride to go get your new part.

So here we go. We'll just take note of where everything is. We've got a lower hose. We've got the upper hose right here. This is where they're going to go into. We've got the petcock. This is where we're going to drain. So when we go to drain the radiator, we're going to pop open the radiator cap, which would be here, up there on the truck. And then we're going to twist this to the left and it should let fluid out. Once that's drained, we can go ahead and replace it, but we're just going to take note of where the clips are for the fan shroud. Some there, some there.

You also want to double check your part, make sure there's no crimps, or cracks, or mangled fins. If when you're installing this and you're gripping onto it, you mess up these fins, you're going to cause an issue. So let's try not to mess up those fins. We could take a peek at the backside. We're going to do the same thing. It looks pretty good. Couple of bent fins, but that's really not a big deal. It's just if you get a lot of it, like if I just wrote my name all over there, Len. Anyways, so this looks pretty good. So, like I said, we want to just kind of take a look at this, and then take a look at the one in the vehicle, and make sure everything lines up. So we know we got the radiator fill cap over here.

Yup. The lower hose should be down at the bottom there. It looks like it is. We've got the fan shroud mounting pieces. Okay. Yeah. Those look good. When you come on over to the other side, we've got the upper hose area. We remembered that that was over here. The petcock should be down there and it is. Well it looks pretty good to me. We could measure it up if you want to grab a measuring tape just to double check. But I already held it up there and I made sure that it kind of matched up. If you wanted to do that, it's pretty simple.

Just take it, it's super heavy. Just kidding, very light. We'll go like this, like that. Looks pretty good. All right, so we're clear to start installing this, so we're going to go ahead and remove this radiator cap. We're going to make sure that it's nice and cool. You haven't just been driving the truck around and it's super hot. It's very cool. It could still under pressure, so make sure you're wearing your safety glasses. Safety's the number one concern at 1A Auto, general rule of life as well, right? You can push down while you're turning to the left. I'm going to turn it and I'm going to do it away from my face just in case there is pressure. You don't want to go like this and put your face over it.

We can inspect our cap. Make sure that the seals, and the gaskets, and all that stuff isn't cracked or dry rotted or swollen. It looks pretty decent. General rule of thumb is you'd want to replace the radiator cap at the same time as the radiator. If you don't have the money or you don't have the radiator cap... This one looks like it's perfectly reusable. I don't see a reason why you wouldn't be able to. You could also take a look. See along here, if you see any green, or red, or sometimes you'll get a lot of white, this could be vaping. So basically what happens is, is when this squishes down like that, it's supposed to do that. So it lets the fluid... When the fluid in your radiator expands, comes up through here and it goes into your fluid reservoir, that's supposed to do that.

But after a while what happens is, is this breaks down in here, there's a little gasket, and then it will start seeping through there or you might get seeping along here and you'll notice white all along the bottom of your radiator right here or the bottom of the area where your radiator screws onto. If you see white there, you definitely have a bad seal and you'd want to replace the radiator cap. So now we're clear to... We've got this off. We're going to bring the vehicle up in the air or get under it, whatever your preference is. And we're going to relieve pressure from the petcock down there. We're going to make sure it goes into a catch bucket. We don't want it going into the ground. Make sure you save the environment, recycles things properly. So let's move along.

So this right here is the petcock. We can use an 18 millimeter socket on that. Turn it to the left. We're going to want to make sure we have our catch bucket ready to catch this coolant. It's going to come down, it could deflect off of here, so make sure you have your face out of the way. Make sure you have a proper collection receptacle, something that you can recycle it with. Make sure it's disposed of properly. So yeah, we'll just go ahead with our 18 millimeter socket and our collection bucket. Let's see how this works.

As you go, it's going to want to pull out. It's doing what it's supposed to do. Here we go. Here we are. We're just going to let it finish doing that. Once it comes to a trickle or even better when it's completely done, we'll continue. All right, so we still got this draining. We've got our safety glasses on all the time when we're under here, we're going to remove a couple of clips. We've got one here. There, in there. Well, it's three, so I guess it's more like a few, right? It's not a couple. Anyways, so we'll remove those few clips right over here. This is your lower radiator hose where it goes onto the radiator. There's a metal clamp. You could use a couple of different tools there. You could use something like this or you can use a tool that's made for it, something like these. This is a nice tool and what this is going to do is it will squeeze that clamp, the two clips.

Let's see if there was a good way for you to see it. You can see the clamp up there. It's metal. It's got two little clips on it. So all we're going to do is we're going to squeeze those two pieces together and then we can hopefully wiggle that hose around, break it free from the radiator. This is, of course, once all the fluid's drained out of it. We don't want any of that getting onto the ground. It's very poisonous. So we'll just wait on that. But what we can do is we can remove those clips.

So I'm going to start over here with this clip. Just try to pull that off. It's just a little clip and it pushes into that hole. If it happens to come out, you just put it someplace where you won't lose it. We're going to do the same thing for the other two moving down the line. If it seems like it doesn't want to come out, you could also use a pair of cutters and just try to grab onto it without actually physically cutting it. Something like these. Basically I use these so I can get under it and then I just kind of pull it. You'll notice I didn't cut it. It's not in the best condition, but it's totally reusable. We'll put it aside where we could find it.

We're moving over towards where the coolant's coming down. So watch your eyes and your mouth. If you don't have to talk because you're doing a YouTube video, it's best to keep your mouth shut. There we are. Perfect. So now once this is done, we'll go ahead and remove this hose right here and we'll be clear to bring the vehicle down to a working level we can reach everything from the top and we'll continue. So now we've got just the light trickle. I'm going to go ahead and close this up as I turn it to the right, you're going to notice that it sucks itself in. You don't have to grip it and rip it, really grab onto it and just give it a little tweak. It should close off. We'll get all this cleaned down a little bit. So now we can remove our bucket from this side and we'll bring it over here to where the lower hose is going to come off.

So now we're going to get in here. All I'm going to do is I'm going to take this wheel well, I'm going to try to pull it back, see if I can get a clear view under there, however you can do to make it stay up. You can even just hold it by your arm if you want, but essentially we just kind of want it to stay up and make sure we're wearing safety glasses in case it comes snapping down. We're going to take this clamp and, like I said, we're going to pinch it down. Once we pinch it, we're going to grab this hose, try to wiggle it around, break it free.

So I'm going to go ahead and use this tool that I had mentioned before. Put it over both ears. One thing I like about this tool is it has little locks. So once you get it squeezed to where you want it, it's locked in, so then you can just kind of wiggle it around. Here we go. I've got my collection bucket so it's ready to catch whatever's going to happen and I move my flashlight. Now I'm just going to wiggle this.

Here we go. Got our little clamp. We're going to keep this. You can either replace it with a new clamp or if this one's still in good condition like this one seems like it is, we can reuse it. Sometimes you'll find them, there'll be very rusted, rotted, and you can almost squeeze them by hand quite a bit. This one, I mean, I'm no Hercules, but it seems like it's still pretty strong. I would say it's reusable. We'll just put this someplace where we can find it.

We've got the hose off. We're going to let that finish trickling down, so we're up top. Now we're just going to do a little assessment and see what we have to do. We have the fan shroud right here. Underneath there, there's going to be a fan that's connected to your engine. Hopefully we're not going to have to remove that, but once we get to that point we'll assess that. But what we want to do is we want to see what we're going to have to start taking apart to get this fan shroud out of the way. So down here there's a 10 millimeter bolt that holds on these lines to the radiator itself, so we'll be removing that. Over here there's a 13 millimeter head, we're going to remove that.

We'll come across there's a little clip right here, we want to make sure that we can get this hose off of here, so we are going to be removing this upper hose from the radiator, moving it out of the way. Then once we get on this side, we're going to have another 13 over here. It looks like there's a wiring harness and that's pretty much it, so this all should come off pretty easily. Assuming that this fan shroud can get far enough out of the way with the fan there. And we're going to take this off right here. Hopefully we can move that radiator around quite a bit to be able to get it out.

So I've got a couple of tools here, basic tools. We're going to need this or cutters and we're going to try to remove these little push pins. There's one here, they come along, we'll find them all as we go. But basically I want to try to get underneath the pushpin best I can here, both of the ears if I can. Watch as it messes with me. It's okay. Be careful with that screwdriver.

Once I get it up a little bit, I can go ahead and use my cutters, grab onto it without cutting it. Let's see if I can slide this under here. I just want to grab onto it with these. I'm going to try to twist and pull. Here we are. And we can lift as we go. We see that there's another one right here holding it in. Try to get under it. Once again, it doesn't feel like it's going to want to come up. Try going this way. Here we are. Flashlight out of the way. Moving along, we can keep lifting to see where everything's getting held down. See if we can get under it. Here we are. We can keep coming along. We're just going to basically grab all these out of here, so we can get this plastic piece up and out of the way.

Now we've removed this, so now we're going to go ahead and see if we can get this thing lifted up. We can use our little tool again, see if we can get under there. It's going to basically try to get the clips up off of the shroud, spin it around so you can see, just a couple little push clips, they push into there. If you wanted to, you could try to take a small screwdriver and see if you can get under there. If you can make magic happen, make it happen. I'm going to move along. I'm going to take off this upper hose right here. I'm going to use the same tool I used before. You can also use pliers as I mentioned before, or even your fingers if you're Hercules. I'm not.

Just get it down there. Squeeze that puppy. I'm just going to take the hose. Now I can really pressure with my tool. Get this right out of our way. Make sure you don't put it in a spot that it can come slapping back up in your face. Now we can continue our assessment of what we're going to have to take off over here and then we'll go head over to the other side. So now we're going to take a 13 millimeter. We're going to take out this fan shroud bolt. This just hold the upper portion of the shroud in. We're going to do the same on the other side of the vehicle once this is out. The bottom area for mounting should just be a little slip in area so there's no bolts to remove there. There's what it looks like. You can set that someplace where we won't lose it. So we have a little wiring harness over here. Got a connection. So what am I going to do is I'm going to take my little tool. I'm going to try to pop it off. There it is.

Next I'm going to try to grab onto this. There's a little squeeze tab right here. I'm going to try to squeeze down on that. If you can't, you could try to use a little pocket screwdriver or whatever you have access to. Just get it in between there. It should break free. Take a peek in there while we got it apart, make sure there's no funny colors, greens purples, reds, blues. Looks nice and clean. We don't have to worry about that. Now we can try to wiggle this fan shroud around.

Nice. So there's one more clip under here which holds in the inner fan shroud, I guess you would say, for the electric fans. Basically you want to take a small screwdriver, if you happen to have one or whatever you have, try to get it in and under here, pull that clip out. Looks something like that. Set it aside where you can find it again because we're going to need it to re-install. Should be able to grab it, see if we can move it around a little bit. All right, let's go back up top. So now that we've got that lower clip out, we're going to come up here. Get a little squeezy tab, just push that towards the radiator, carefully lift up, break that free. Come over to the other side, do the same thing. Squeeze your little tab, lift up, drop it back down into the hole again, and do it all over again. This time hold it up. Let's see if I can do it. I'm trying not to let it fall back down. So this time of course it's going to give me a hassle.

Here we go. I'm just going to pull that away and try to slide it into this fan shroud a little bit more so we have some room. If you're lucky enough to have a wrench like this, it's a ratchet wrench. Find them anywhere. I'm going to try to remove this 12 millimeter head down here. There's a bolt that holds the AC condenser to the radiator. There's a bracket. I want to try to get this removed, so I'm going to try to get my fingers in here somehow magically. Here we are. I'm going to turn it to the left. If you're using a regular wrench, good luck. I might even be able to get in with a ratchet of some sort. I'm just going to go with this ratchet wrench. I'm going to remove this completely and then I'm going to move up to the top up there, remove that 12th. So I've got one bolt out.

This one's almost all the way out. Let's see if I can get it without dropping it. Almost. There it is. Match them up. They look the same. We don't have to worry about mixing them up. Put them aside where we can find them. Now we're going to go ahead with those 10 millimeters. Like I said, there's one there, one there, one there, one there, and then we'll go ahead and check the other side, it should be a couple more times over there. All right, so I got that second bolt almost all the way out. At this point the bracket's going to come loose, so you're going to want to make sure that if it does fall you can find it. See if we can get it out, show you what it looks like.

Here we are. So there's our two 10 millimeters and then our 12 millimeter head. If you're worried about forgetting somehow, it's pretty easy to remember. It's small hole, small hole, big hole. So here we go. I get the last bolt almost all the way out. I'm going to hold onto my bracket because it's going to be ready to fall right out. Here it is. Here's my upper bracket. Looks about the same as the lower. I wouldn't say we have to worry too much about matching it up, but if you were worried about it, you can just set it however you want. You could put your lower one here, your upper one there, so you can remember whatever you want to do.

Just going to keep everything aside where I can find it. I've got my four bolts there. I've got my two bigger bolts, so now we're going to come over to this side. We've got a couple more 10 millimeters. We've got our last 10 millimeter, it's coming out. I'm holding onto the bracket. This one's going to come out a little differently. It slides into the radiator, so hopefully we can get it. That's what it looks like. We've got our 10 millimeter bolts. It matches up with the other ones over there, but we'll keep it over here. Let's give this a little wiggle.

Here we go. We'll just come over this way. We can take a peek to see if it's still attached to anywhere. It might just be the lines kind of holding it tight. It looks like maybe one more. Maybe if we loosen up this 10 millimeter/take it out, this should all come free. So let's try that. So we have a couple more 10 millimeter heads we're going to remove. We've got this one right here. You can see with my little screwdriver, I'm pointing that out hopefully for you. That one. And then there's one right here. So we'll remove those two and we'll move on from there. So I've got this bolt almost all the way out. I'm turning it to the left of course. It feels like it's pretty loose. I'll see if I can grab it with my fingers. And I could if I could reach it a little bit better. So I'm just going to continue with my socket, 10 millimeter.

Okay. Try not to drop it. Nice long one. Set that aside where we could find it. Now we're going to move on to our next 10 millimeter head bolt right there. I'm going to go back to my wrench and give that a try. Turning it to the left, counter clockwise. See if this moves around now. Oh yeah, that's much better. So now this isn't connected to our radiator anymore. Now that we're not worried about that, we can move on to the next step. So now what we should have left to remove is our radiator anchor bolts right here. There's one here, one over there. It should be a 13 millimeter socket. You can try to use a wrench or whatever you have access to.

We're first going to turn it to the left. If you had an extension to bring it out here, that would probably be helpful. I'm going to grab one, so we'll get this right out of the way. Just give it a little twist and tug. Put it some place where we can find it. We don't want to leave it off. That's for the overflow. We're going to continue with this bolt, turning into the left. Let's see. There it is. 13 millimeter. Put that aside where we can find it over, move over, do the same to the other side. It's almost out.

Here we are. It's about the same as the other side and put it where we can't lose it. Radiator should move around into the center here. See about lifting it. See if there's anything jamming it up. If we look down here, there's some wiring harnesses. We are going to want to be very careful when we're looking up on the radiator, not to tug on anything there. So we got this moving around. We'll notice that it's holding onto this right here. What we're going to do is we're just going to take our condenser. We're going to pull it a little bit towards the passenger side of the vehicle. There's a little ear on the condenser that slides into the bottom of the radiator. I'll show you the slot once I get this out.

You're going to have to wiggle it around, see if you can get it by all this wonderful stuff they put there for you. If it seems like it's getting stuck, just check to see what it keeps getting stuck on. Okay? You don't want to keep tugging if it's stuck on something. It might be wiring, it might be hoses. There's also coolant coming out, so I'll just keep it tilted like this for a couple of minutes here. Let it finish running out and we'll move on. So we're going to continue trying to lift now that I got the majority of that coolant out, paying attention to everything that's lifting with me. Make sure I don't have any AC lines stuck on anything.

I'm going to try to come over here. There we are. It just takes a little bit of finagling. Come on baby. We're almost there. Now we've removed our radiator. We have our old radiator, we just took it out of the 2016 Dodge Ram. We've got our new radiator, quality from 1A Auto. We like to do a little comparison, show you how everything compares. So as you can tell, this lines up with where that's supposed to be, at this right here. Looks good. Got the upper hose where it's supposed to line up. We got all the little clips right here and it comes with a little baggie of hardware for you. So that's always important. You want to make sure you replace anything you can, right?

Lastly, we'll just bring it over here. I'll show you that it lines up that way. So if you had one, that this side we'll say is lined up, right? And then we come over to this side and it's all the way the heck over there. And we probably got the wrong part, don't we? So you always want to compare it, make sure you get it lined up, and go like this. It looks like it sits over it fairly nice. So I'd say we're clear to install this quality 1A Auto part.

So you'll notice our old radiator when we took it off, it still has these bushings in here. We're going to want to remove these and put them into our new one. So assuming these are in good condition, after we get them off, we're going to put them into our new one, I should say. I'm just going to see if I can get my little small screwdriver in here. Try to pry it out. If it doesn't want to, we could probably try to use a little bit of penetrant and we'll try it again. All right, so I'm going to see if I can get this popped out. There's one, that's what it looks like. It's got a little groove, slides into there, just like that. So we'll do this in to our new radiator. Put that aside and do the same thing for this side. Now look at that.

I used a little bit of penetrant, it practically fell right out. We'll check it. It doesn't look swollen, cracked, broken. Looks good. See the groove slides in there. Easy peasy. We'll set this aside. So we'll notice there's two different sides to these. There's this side with the flat, there's the side without the flat. We're going to go ahead and put the flat side against the body. So this would be where it would mount up against the body. Slide that in, move it here, do the same thing on this one, just like that. So we've got our little box of goodies. Can't go wrong, right?

We get these little clips. We have to remember which way we brought the bolts through. So when we were moving those bolts, we came through from this side, so this clip is going to go right here. You can remember because it's right next to this. We're going to do the next clip. Let's see if we can find where it goes real quick. Why wouldn't we have one for each side? Right? There we go. Our bolt's going to come through from this direction, so we want the nut side to be on there. This leaves us these two little squares.

You got a little slot right here and a slot right there. So we're going to take these squares, just push them in. The next little square, push that in. We've got our squares. We've got our clips. So I've got my radiator on my hand. I'm going to try to come in between the condenser and these two fan shrouds. I need to be very careful because it's got want to fight you going all the way down, but anywhere you can see that could cut into any of these little panels, you're going to want to be very careful as we're going down, pay special attention to every place that could cut into all these little panels. This is for your air to go through.

You start pinning those over, you're slowing down air going through your radiator, and it's not doing what it should be. So I'm going to see if I can get this down. I'm just going to fanangle it a little bit this way, a little bit this way. You have to do whatever works for you on your side there. I'm just kind of showing you the basics of how this has got to go. I'm just pulling this condenser a little bit out of my way.

I can try to maneuver this around a little bit. Remember we have those ears to catch these on the... let's see. I'll show you on this side. We've got the ears here to catch these, so if you can't get by that, you're going to have to just kind of work it around a little bit. Next, we're going to have this big piece. It's got to get past these lines, so we're going to have to kind of try to twist this and push it. We might have to come at an angle. If that's the case, just figure it out. Okay. It feels like it's starting to want to go down a little bit. There we are.

If you're like me, you're going to want to just shove it as hard as you can to get it over with, but we're not going to do that today. Let's just do it right. We'll do it once. Get it set down in there. Get this side set down into its hole. It feels like that should be lined up. So we have a couple of little rubbers right here. This is where the radiator will mount down into the body. So what I want to do is I want to try to remove that. It should just pop off. We might have to use a little screwdriver of some sort, in which case I'll have to go get one. Here we are, as you can tell it's a little moon.

Come over to this side. We're going to do the same thing. There we are. Throw it on the ground. Now that we'll have moon. So down here we have a little hole and on the radiator itself there's a shaft coming out. Basically this part right here is going to fit into the hole in the body. This part right here is going to be where the radiator slides down into. We'll notice there's a half moon, like I said before. The flat end of it goes towards the front end of the vehicle. So we can go ahead and either put this onto the radiator first and then drop it in the hole or we can put this in the hole and then drop the radiator in. It's up to you. You do you booboo.

You're going to lift this up, the whole, I'm not going to worry about forcing that in yet because I'm going to do the other side. So now I got both those rubbers in. I'm going to go ahead and see if I can fanangle this, get it to settle in. I got that side. Take a look. Looks like it's pretty close. Try to get my hand in there. Here we are. Okay. While it's still able to move around, we don't need to worry about forcing it all completely in yet because we can go ahead and get the rest of this mounted up at the same time. It might just pop back out of those rubbers and that's okay. We're not too worried about it because we can put them back in nice and easy.

I just want to grab this, bring it up to approximately where it should go. All right, so we've got our bracket again, we can pay attention to where you can see little circles on the bracket. That's where the washers on the bolts were, there's two of them. There's another one over there. You can see where the rectangle was. That's from the condenser. We're just going to take this and slide it in this slot.

We're going in the top slot, not the bottom. It's easy to make that mistake. Let me see if we can line this up. I'm just going to start these in. I'm not going to tighten them up yet because I need to be able to wiggle all this around to continue mounting in the other side. So now we get this. It's going to hold this up. We can move over here. So I'm going to use this bolt. I'm going to get it started. I'm going to try to get the lines that go to the bracket on the radiator with this bolt. So once I get this in and started, I'll show you where it actually is. It's hard to get my hand in here. So what I did is I started in this bolt right here with the 10 millimeter. It's just a 10 millimeter head.

You might have to hold the radiator and the condenser, wiggle things around. Try to get the two holes lined up. It's going to be fun. It's going to be interesting. There might be some curse words involved, but you could do it. So we're just going to get that in. Once we get it a few threads, we're going to go ahead and start doing the other one. We don't want to tighten anything up yet. We're going to tighten everything up once we get to the end here.

Next I started in this 10 millimeter head bolt, it goes right in here. And all that's going to do is it's going to hold the lines to the radiator. So I'm going to go ahead and start that in a few threads, like I said before. I'm not going to tighten anything yet. We want to make sure everything can move around until we get everything, so it's started, and then we can go ahead and tighten it down.

So next we're going to go ahead and put on these brackets. There's two of them. There's an upper and a lower. They're both the exact same. If you mixed them up on accident, don't worry. There's going to be two 10 millimeter bolts that go here, 10 millimeter head bolts and then this one right here, which I believe was at 12. We're going to go ahead and start these in and then we're going to do the top bracket. We're going to do the same thing, just starting them in, leave everything loose, and we'll move along. So we've got this upper bracket started. I've got the two 10 millimeter head bolts right there.

As you can see it, it's still nice and loose. I got my 12 over here and that screws into the radiator. Keep it nice and loose. We don't want to coming off, but we also don't want it too tight yet. We're going to do the same for the bottom bracket. So the same thing I did on the top bracket I did on the bottom. I put in this 12 millimeter head bolt, my two 10s, so now everything's all started in. I can go ahead and start tightening up the condenser to the radiator portion. I'm just going to get these in nice and snug by finger here. I'm going to use my ratchet wrench or whatever you happen to have with a 10 millimeter, turning to the right, it's hard to get to in that direction. I'll just come over here.

We don't need to really riff on it. Try to pull, break anything here. This is all very sensitive equipment. Once it's snugged or it's bottomed out, just give it a little extra and that's it. We don't need a big long ratchet or anything like that and try to lift all the way out here. Too much leverage. Just come in close. That's that. So we got this one. We're going to come over here, tighten up all four of these 10s. Then we're going to grab those 12s and then we're going to come around the back side over here and finish these up. So I got all our 10s in. I got all four 10s nice and screwed in. I got our 12s screwed in, so the brackets are nice and tight. We can feel it. That's the whole radiator moving, just so you know, because all we did right now is basically just mount the condenser to the radiator. So I'm going to tighten this one up. I'm using a 10 millimeter, we don't need to go too tight.

Here we go. We'll move on to our last bolt, which is right here. It's another 10 millimeter so we can continue with the same tool if we want. Like I said before, we don't need to be... this is a nice long ratchet. We don't need to use that whole length of, the whole a leverage of it. We just want to snug it up. All this is doing is it's securing the lines to the radiator. So nice and secured. Double check, make sure we got all the bolts. We don't have anything left over over here. All we've got is mounting bolts left. So we've got our condenser connected to the radiator. It's in there nice. Next we're going to go inside here, being careful not to drag our arms too much up and down this. It'll cause scratches, gouges, cuts. We want to be very careful and also we want to be careful of these fins on the radiator. Like I said before, we don't want to try to squish those down. If some of them do get squished down a little bit, don't cry about it. It should be all right.

So we're going to lift this up and let's see if I can get my arm out of the way to show you. There's a clip right here and another one right here. Basically where the inside fan is going to sit is right inside those and it's going to do the same on the other side, so I'm going to carefully reach in here. I'm going to try to lift it up. You might have to wiggle it around a little bit.

You can do the same for the other side hopefully. Let's see what it looks like. There we go. We'll just make sure that it is actually in there on the bottom and the top. I'm going to come over here. If it's in on the top and the bottom, perfect. There we are. Now we can take our little clip. This one right here. We're going to put it so the long side faces down on the shroud. There's also a little tab on the shroud right there. It's hard to see. It's very small. That's going to fit right inside that little slot, so if you happen to forget, that's where it goes. I'm going to try to pinch it together, push that down.

We want to remember that we took one of these off on the bottom, so we're going to go ahead and get under there. We're going to put on the other one for the bottom, and then we can go ahead and mount this on, and then we'll mount the radiator to the body. All right, so be careful for any drips that might come under here. We've got our little clip that's pretty much the same as the one that goes up top. We get the long end and the short end. The long end has a little tab hole and this has a little tab sticking out. So we're going to go ahead and make sure that it's up against the radiator.

Push that up and in like that. While we're under here, if you wanted to, we can do this part, but we'll wait on that. We're going to get it all mounted in and then we'll get this underneath when we're done. So we get our little clips. We're going to go ahead and slide them into this groove right here. You want to make sure that it's going in this direction because we are going to be putting the bolt this way. You don't want it facing the opposite way. The bolt won't want to go in that way. So we'll just slide it in just like that. I'm going to do the same thing for the other ear on the other side.

All right, so here we go. We got our last little piece right here that we're going to attach. So I'm going to make sure that I have this ear right here setting down into this slot. I'm going to make sure that this is out and not tucked in underneath the back there because we need it out to connect to this. This ear is going to go over here and there should be a bolt hole that's going to connect right there. So I'm going to lift it up, get it worked into where I believe it needs to go. You're going to need to give it a couple of tries. We might even get this side in and then go over to the other side. Start wiggling that around to get it in. We'll come back over, and check this, and we're going to realize that we have to do it again.

So go over and do the same to the other side. We're just finding our little clip holes. We'll try to line it up. Here we are, get that lined up. Check my other side, like I mentioned, stayed in. Nice. We've got our bolts that we set aside so we wouldn't lose. I'm just going to put that inside the hole right here. Very nice. We can go ahead and put it in the other one. We can snug these right up that they don't have to be very tight.

Okay. So I feel it's so it's bottomed out. Just give it a little bit more. It feels good. I'm going to do the same to the other side. So I'm on the last bolt right here over here. That feels pretty good. We'll just double check, make sure everything's in and settled in where it's supposed to go on the clips. If you have any of them out, it's going to cause an issue. You could have your fan hitting up against your shroud. It's going to cause noise going down the road, it could cause damage. This looks good. Perfect. So now we can put in these last two bolts, connecting our little wiring harness here, do a little hose action, and we'll get back underneath.

So here's our mounting bolt for the radiator. It's going to go through this little donut that we put on there just like this. You can see it coming through, line it up with the hole. We're not going to tighten this down until we go ahead and put it on the other one. But while we're over here, I'm going to grab this connector. I can see where the lock is. I can see where the lock is on the other side. I can connect it right in like that. We got a little mounting spot right here. It should just slide in. It feels great. Now I'm going to go do the other bolt. Now that we have them both started, we can go ahead and tighten these down. You can use an air ratchet or whatever you might have. I'm just going to go with this because I got all the time in the world.

It feels like it's getting close now. Yup, there we go. There we go. That feels good. Get the connector on there, make sure this is nice and snug. Feels good, not going anywhere. We grab our hose. It should match up right here still, push that in. Now we can grab our little hose pliers. Like I said before, you can use regular pliers if you want. I'm just going to use these. This is what they're made for and I like them because they lock, so I don't have to hold pliers and I can use two hands to do this. There we are. Now when we get this back on, we want to pay special attention to where the grooves are. I don't know if you can see where the clamp originally was. It's darker. You want to try and get this matched up exactly where it was before.

Some people say it's not that big of a deal. Some people say it is a really big deal. Why not just do it if we can, right? Give it a little tug. That feels good. It goes along, that's in. This is the hose that leads to the overflow. We're just going to put this on, slide it on there. It fits on good. Get any crud out of there. Now we're going to go underneath and we'll finish up from under there. So same as with the other clamp, we want to make sure that we have this going the same direction as when we took it off. So we remember that we had to come in from this side to do it, but what we may or may not remember is if it was this way or this way. So we'll just ask the hose. The hose knows. That's what we'll say.

I can see there's two prongs on the bottom side and one thick one coming down from the center. So that tells me that this is the way that it was. It wasn't this way, right? Because we have the two prongs on the bottom side this way. So we're going to go this way. We're going to go ahead and put it on our tool and then we'll put it on the hose. So we've got it on our tool. We can bring it in here, grab our hose, slide it right over the hose. We'll get it all aligned in a second. Basically right now, while it's over the hose, we're going to put the hose on the bottom area of the radiator, slide it all the way down till it connects with this nub. That means it's bottomed out. Now we can just fanangle our clamp to where it originally was. Relieve pressure. Let's get it closer again.

It's like it needs to maybe slide just to scotch backward. It doesn't have to be perfect or maybe it does for you, I don't know. For me close enough is close enough, but here we go. I'm just going to try again, last time. It looks pretty good. Give it a little pool. It's nice and tight. If for some reason it wasn't holding on and you can move the hose around quite a bit, you would just want to replace this clamp, which isn't a big deal. You can get them anywhere. So now we're back underneath. We're going to be paying attention for drips. Stuff's still dripping, so make sure you're wearing your safety glasses.

We'll make sure that this is tight. This is your petcock where the coolant will come out of when you go to drain it. It feels tight. You can grab it with pliers if you want, but be careful not to over tighten it. I'm going to go ahead and push in these three push clips. This is the one that came out. Just drive it up in here hopefully. Let's see if I can get this one in. Grab this one. Here we are. So we get all of that, mount it in. We checked the petcock, we made sure that clamp was on nice and snug. We're going to clean all this down once we're done.

All right, let's go back up top. So our next step for me would be checking to make sure that this holds pressure. To do that, I'm going to use a vacuum system. This also works for filling. It works great for filling actually. If you don't have access to something like this, which is just an air lift system, you can go ahead and get one of these tools which we sell. It's a Lisle product. You can buy it right here at 1aauto.com. This will help you fill it and then you'll just have to run it and see if it has any leaks. For me if I have access to it, and I do, I'm just going to go with this tool right here. Connect it in.

I'm going to come over here. I'm going to watch the pressure. We got a little gauge system here. We want it to come up into the green. As you could see, it's stuck down the hoses. That's normally nice, and round, and fluffy. I'm just going to let it keep building until it stops building. Once it gets to that point, I'll cut off the air to it and I'll make sure that it holds pressure for a good five, maybe six, 10 minutes, whatever you want to go with. If it does, then we can go ahead and fill it with the manufacturer's specified coolant.

So I've been leaving this on here for a little while now. I got it pretty much holding still right there. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to cut off the pressure like that. I can remove the air hose if I want. And now I'm just going to leave this, like I said, five, six, 10 minutes, whatever you want to do, see if it goes down. It might go down a scotch, that's okay. But if it starts going down yellow, God forbid red, that means we have an issue. The issues could be a leaky hose, a crack someplace on the radiator, maybe during installation or shipping, anything's possible. So we just want to make sure that it holds pressure.

The way that you would check to see if it holds pressure without having this tool, you have your little tool right here, you're going to fill up the system, you're going to run it, burp out all the air that you can, close it up with the radiator cap, and then just run it. And then just basically just look for a leak after it's been running for a while and then builds up pressure. This way to me seems like it makes it a little bit more sense. We can use this to fill it. In the end we're going to run it and everything. So we'll put this all in, put a little bit of coolant in there, let it burp through. But we'll let this sit.

All right, so as you can tell, it's still holding pressure exactly where we left it. I left it like this for a while now because I went and found some coolant. So what we want to do is we want to make sure we use coolant that's either 50, 50 pre diluted or you want to make sure that you dilute it 50, 50. So if you have concentrate, you want it to be 50% concentrate, 50% water essentially. So basically this is already pre diluted, so that means that we don't have to do anything with it. This also says for all makes and models to add to any color, any freeze. So if you get one that says 50, 50, green, that's not going to work in this vehicle.

Yeah. When it says 50, 50, I don't know, purple, green, whatever, it might not work in this vehicle. We just went with this because it works for anything, but it has to be 50, 50. So here we go. We're going to go ahead and add to it. The way I'm going to do it is because I'm using this air lift system. I love it. Well, I'm going to take off this right here. Obviously we're not going to get much coolant out with that in there.

I'm just going to put it in. I'm going to turn my little crank here. Now you can see that the pressure's kind of going. And the way that this is happening is I created a vacuum, so now the vacuum's sucking coolant from inside here up into the radiator, through the cooling system. When you feel like it's getting a little low, which it almost kind of feels like it's getting a little low. I'm wearing safety glasses so that's why I have it this close to my face. I'm going to stop it before it goes empty because I want to try to keep coolant inside this hose. If you get a little bit of air, that's okay. If you get a lot of air, well, you just put air inside your cooling system so you might as well just use the funnel. I'm going to go ahead and do this again and keep it going.

I like to hold it up like this. You can put it down if you want. For me, it seems like gravity works a little bit better this way. So we're getting low on vacuum. It still feels like there is plenty of coolant in here, so we'll just wait til that gets down either to zero or pretty much at zero. At this point you definitely want to have the jug up higher because if you have it down low there won't be enough suction to suck it up because of gravity.

Okay. That seems pretty good. I'm just going to pinch this off. I'll remove my tool, relieve pressure. That lets the coolant go back into the bucket. We have very minimal mess here. That's great. So our handy kit came with all sorts of adapters, but I found a couple that I'm going to use just like this. I'm going to use the black adapter in this. The reason why I'm using this is because it has this size right here. It fits perfectly into the hole under the radiator. That feels nice. And I'm going to take the cap. I'm go ahead and screw it right on here. It goes on nice and snug. I can't wiggle this around. If I could take this and go, "woo-ooo." I'd have the wrong adapter.

Next we have our little stopper, so we can remove that if we want, put it right here. Now we can fill this up with some coolant. We're going to continue with the 50, 50 that we were using. I'll finish off this jug and then I'll grab another jug. Once again, I'm wearing my safety glasses as this is bubbling. It could spit a little bit up into my face. Safety first. I like to just squeeze the upper radiator hose a little bit. That just kind of helps push out any air that might be sitting in the top of the radiator there somewhere.

As you can tell I'm burping it out. This is helping it along. If you go ahead and you go really fast, you're going to aerate the system, you're going to have a lot of little air bubbles in there. We want to try to keep big air bubbles. Big air bubbles come out a lot easier than a whole bunch of little ones. Just going to put this up to here. We could even bring it up a little higher. You don't need to go too high though, but you do want to pay attention to the level because what's going to happen is I'm going to keep burping it. I'm going to burp more air out. It's going to suck more fluid down. Once it gets down here, we're going to want to make sure we fill it up, right? We don't want to be suck in more air back in there.

We could do this a bunch more times or we can just stop where we're at now. We can fill this back up to approximately here and run the vehicle until it gets hot. That'll help burp out any other fluid that's inside the system, and then we can figure it finish up with whatever fluid's left. We'll dispose of it properly. So while we got this sitting, hanging out, waiting, I'm going to go ahead and put on this plastic shroud right here. Let's see if we could figure out how it goes back on. Everything should kind of line up the way that it was. Let's see. We've got one right here. This is going to go into this hole, so that'll give us a start of where we're going. Go ahead and put it down. We'll just kind of line everything up now as we go along. We should line up going along the line. Here we are.

If it doesn't seem like it wants to line up, maybe this thing's a little crooked, you can take a peek underneath right here. This goes in this hole, if you have it off to the side or maybe you pulled on it too much or you tweaked it, it's not lining up, just line it up, man, or woman, person, whoever you are. You could bonk it. Sometimes it feels good to bonk it. Put that in there. Okay. Just double check. One, two, three, four, five, six. All right. You got all those down.

All right, everybody, so we've ran this for a little while now. We have to be careful. Everything is a little warm. The hoses are going to be hot. All right, we got the majority of the air out of here. We're hoping that we've got it all out. It's quite possible that there's maybe a little bit left in there, but what we're going to do is we're going to move forward, okay? For the purpose of this video, I want to continue. I want to show you that this is your coolant reservoir area right here, so basically when you're coolant heats up, it expands. It's going to come through this hose right here, which is the top of the radiator. Your radiator cap is going to let the little spring come up. It's going to let fluid come through this. Go into this overflow.

It'll also let fluid go from the overflow to the radiator if this for some reason went low. So basically when the fluid expands, it comes through, goes to the overflow, cools back down, it's going to start condensing back down, it's going to suck a little bit of fluid from here back into the radiator. Okay? So we're going to carefully open this up. It's not under pressure or anything like that, but you should always wear safety glasses. It's very important, okay? Safety is key. Lift this, I've got a little doodad here. We'll pull it out. We can take a look. It looks a little dirty. I'm just going to clean it off, so hopefully we can see the levels on this.

Okay. Maybe if I hold it kind of close to the black, I don't know if you can see it better that way or maybe up closer, what's best for you, I don't know. Right here I can see maximum, M-A-X, down here minimum. Okay? So we want it to be somewhere in between here. We don't need it to be all the way up here because if we fill it up to here when it's cold, when this expands, it's going to come up, up, up, up, up, and God forbid it's going to come up and out here and onto the ground, in which case we're polluting the environment and that's very bad. Okay?

So now that I cleaned this off, I'm going to put it back in, I'm going to check our level. Put it down, lift it up. Okay. I can see it looks like it's wet about up to here. There's no coolant inside this hole. There is up there. It looks like it's wet pretty much up to here. So here's our maximum, down there is our minimum. So if we wanted to, we could try to bring it up to maybe here or, I mean, I guess if you wanted to, you can go to the max, but preferably let's just go here.

So what I'm going to do, I still have a little bit of coolant left inside my reservoir container here, after burping it all out, I'm just going to squeeze on the radiator hose. Give it a little bit. I put this in. That's going to plug it. All right? Now I can go ahead and lift this. Nothing's leaking out, just a little drip. That's okay. I'm going to go like this. I'm going to put all this wonderful coolant right in there. I'll just stop it real quick because I don't know how fast this is filling that up. We'll check it.

Okay. It looks like it came up in another hole, two holes. It looks like I'm right up to where I want to be. So what are we going to do with the rest of this coolant? We're not going to put it down the drain or into the ground. We'll put it right back in our coolant bucket, okay? So I'll close this up. I'll be clear to take off the rest of this. Put my cap back on in one second. I'm just going to dispose of this properly, and then we'll put the cap on, and we'll be all set.

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