Hey dudes. After a long 2 weeks in the garage, the zxr finally got some road yesty for about half hour blat round the burbs. Will post photos soon. Temp gauge shot up pretty quick and hovered above the half way mark. At no point did i hear the fan. This is troubling, coz when it comes to wiring, I am a total halfwit. What to do? Cheers
You can do what I did with my fan. Take a look in my build thread. The black wire need to be attached to the frame and the blue wire will need a switch in it and then run it to the battery. Sounds like your thermo stat has packed it in like mine. Also if you do the same way I did you can still plug the connection back together. That way when you do fix the thermo stat it can still engage the fan also. EDIT: test the fan by running a 2 wires from the batter to the fan plug first to make sure you fan works. Also the fan plug is the male end. The wiring loom is the female.
If you are riding like stink or stuck in traffic then the temp going to half is no big deal to me. Fans usually dont come on till u get into the last quarter When u hit the red line then its time to panic. My FZR fan doesnt come on unless u have been riding hard then u totally stop for a minute or 2. As Tim suggests , test the fan ..... just wire it directly to the battery. The only way to learn about wiring is to get amongst it .....first thing to do with the fan is check all the connections are there and clean and any plugs into the wiring are actually connected. Have u flushed out the coolant? ...... again look at Tims thread as its discussed there. Its an an easy job and decent coolant is cheap enough. http://2fiftycc.com/index.php?threads/im-trying-something-new-my-zxr250.2086/page-2#post-18988 Heres what can happen over time ...... my ZXR ......it had sat in a shed for 5 years , but that has to be total lack of upkeep as well.
Cheers guys. Went through your thread Tim, and its all french to me. Are those wires connected to the radiatr fan? Isnt there an existing earth in that circuit already? Im a complete novice in wiring sorry mate
Your correct there is a earth already. But if there is a bad connection and it's not earthing the fan won't work. I never tested the earth wire. The black wire is your earth. And will be attached to the frame. The blue wire is the one that gets attached to the + terminal of your battery.
Thanks Tim. I just unplugged the wiring loom from the switch, bought a 4 buck switch from supercheap that plugged straight in. Taped it up and zip tied to the fairing strut. Fan works sweet. Question is, does the thermostat trigger the radiator pump aswell? Will the coolant cycle through the system without a thermostat opening? Will the fan be enough on its own?
The pump spins when the motor is running. The thermo stay is only for the fan to engage (not 100% sure on this). So the coolant will flow. I has with my bike and my thermo stat is fudged. The fan alone keeps my bike at half temp all the time even while at idle.
If your fan is running well when you directly wire it up and you're seeing your temp gauge go up (assuming this is out of the ordinary) there's really only three things that could be happening to your cooling system. (1) The thermostat isn't working properly check this out: and to answer Tim's question yes this pretty much tells the system when to engage the fan on the radiator. (2) The water pump isn't pushing water through your engine. (3) Blockage (1) is a little trickier to solve but as I'm unfamiliar with your bike I'm not sure what type of thermostat you have etc, maybe you have the same type as in the video and can test it in a similar way. (2) is pretty simple to test. Some cooling systems rely on pressure to flow to operate correctly but a simple check of the water pump I always do is take the radiator cap off and start the bike. You should see coolant flowing through. If it isn't, your water pump has a problem. From memory, a lot of water pumps fail by dumping coolant out a little valve-like mechanism in the bottom, meaning your radiator will slowly empty. So if you have coolant and you can see it flowing when the bike is running, chances are it's probably not the water pump. (3) If your thermostat is fine and your water pump seems to be pushing water through the system the only other thing is a blockage somewhere in the cooling hoses/system. Pretty easy to take the hoses off and check it all just in case. Good luck.
Thanks guys. Much appreciated. Havnt had time to check the thermostat; from the manual, it seems to be under the tank and the airbox, so thats a job for another day. I might have overfilled the radiator; when I ran the bike without the cap, coolant was pissin out like to high heaven. The manual switch works like a dream though, brings the temp right down to the lowest bar, even in heavy traffic
