As all you Cinq owners know our little cars are prone to running a bit on the hot side and theres not really a lot to be done for this except keep the system clean and maybe an aluminium radiator, but if the water gets there hot already its got its work cut out.
As I ran Renault 5 GT Turbo's for many years which can also suffer from having a hot engine bay I thought I would apply some knowledge gained from my ownership with regards to the Cinq.
Now there are no copper core radiators that I've seen (all 5's should have one)which are best for cooling but a simple and effective way of keeping things cool is to have lower temperature thermostats, this is even more relevant if you run lots of mods or especially turbos where the heat under the bonnet gets high. As an experiment i ran the car with no thermostat at all, and the cooling system, although fairly cold at the moment proved to be very efficient never letting my car get above about 55degrees and taking a long time stationary to get hot enough for the fan to kick in, so alls well in that department, but we can't run with no thermostat as the car wouldn't function to well.
So on investigation when I removed thermostat (located on the head) it doesn't open until 96degrees which is a bit on the high side for me leaving the cooling system to play catch up, so I headed off to Halfords and hunted through all the thermostats available on the shelf, taking note that the vast majority open at 88 some 86 and a few at 82degrees , ideal for my purposes (on the 5 they now run 78degree thermostats but its far to big to consider)
I then purchased a 82degree thermostat (think item code is HTK602, no idea what car its from) that looked like it would fulfil my purposes as it looked like the same diameter and length and opened in the correct direction, with the intention of dismantling it and using it & using the parts to rebuild into the Cinq housing which is unique (why is that when 90% of all thermostats are the same shape?)
This was time consuming and tricky but achievable and I now have a working 82degree thermostat which I think will give the cooling system a fairer chance of keeping everything cool. If anyone does this make sure you test the operation in a pot of water that you put on the cooker to raise the temperature to watch it opening, then let the water cool to watch it close again, don't just put it back on the car without prior testing.
I started this not really thinking about how useful the info is so managed to get a couple of photos taken before my battery died.
In this 1st pic you can see a complete Cinq thermostat in its housing, the spring and actual thermostatic device from another Cinq thermostat I had, and the new donor thermostat.
in this pic you can see the reassembled Cinq thermostat with the dismantled donor thermostat and the thermostatic device and spring (which has rolled off to the back)
I hope that all makes sense, but if there are any points anyone would like to ask then please do.
Aaron.
As I ran Renault 5 GT Turbo's for many years which can also suffer from having a hot engine bay I thought I would apply some knowledge gained from my ownership with regards to the Cinq.
Now there are no copper core radiators that I've seen (all 5's should have one)which are best for cooling but a simple and effective way of keeping things cool is to have lower temperature thermostats, this is even more relevant if you run lots of mods or especially turbos where the heat under the bonnet gets high. As an experiment i ran the car with no thermostat at all, and the cooling system, although fairly cold at the moment proved to be very efficient never letting my car get above about 55degrees and taking a long time stationary to get hot enough for the fan to kick in, so alls well in that department, but we can't run with no thermostat as the car wouldn't function to well.
So on investigation when I removed thermostat (located on the head) it doesn't open until 96degrees which is a bit on the high side for me leaving the cooling system to play catch up, so I headed off to Halfords and hunted through all the thermostats available on the shelf, taking note that the vast majority open at 88 some 86 and a few at 82degrees , ideal for my purposes (on the 5 they now run 78degree thermostats but its far to big to consider)
I then purchased a 82degree thermostat (think item code is HTK602, no idea what car its from) that looked like it would fulfil my purposes as it looked like the same diameter and length and opened in the correct direction, with the intention of dismantling it and using it & using the parts to rebuild into the Cinq housing which is unique (why is that when 90% of all thermostats are the same shape?)
This was time consuming and tricky but achievable and I now have a working 82degree thermostat which I think will give the cooling system a fairer chance of keeping everything cool. If anyone does this make sure you test the operation in a pot of water that you put on the cooker to raise the temperature to watch it opening, then let the water cool to watch it close again, don't just put it back on the car without prior testing.
I started this not really thinking about how useful the info is so managed to get a couple of photos taken before my battery died.
In this 1st pic you can see a complete Cinq thermostat in its housing, the spring and actual thermostatic device from another Cinq thermostat I had, and the new donor thermostat.
in this pic you can see the reassembled Cinq thermostat with the dismantled donor thermostat and the thermostatic device and spring (which has rolled off to the back)
I hope that all makes sense, but if there are any points anyone would like to ask then please do.
Aaron.
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