How to Replace Fan Shroud 1994-2002 Dodge RAM 1500

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm going to be working on a 1996 Dodge Ram 1500. We're going to be removing fan shroud. If you need any parts, check us out, 1aauto.com. Thanks. We're just going to grab this hose. Give it a little twist off the radiator just like that. Take a peak at it. Make sure it doesn't look like it's all dry, rotted and cracked. This one looks like it's reusable. We're going to grab this. Just give it a nice little jerk in the upward direction and it should want to break free.

There it is. What was holding it in? You get these right here, this right here, and then this little nub. Okay? So those just slide right into here. That's where the nub goes and then of course down here and you get this little area down along the bottom. You want to make sure that you line that up with the area on the bottom of your reservoir. So there it is. Set this aside. So as we take a look down here, you're going to see what I'm seeing. We see we've got our serpentine belt on here and that goes around our water pump pulley, which is right down there. The water pump pulley has the fan clutch mounted onto it. So we're going to have to remove the fan clutch to be able to get the pulley off, right? We'll have to take off the serpentine belt and then we can get to all the mounting bolts for the water pump.

It might be easier and we're probably going to do this. We're just going to take the fan shroud right out of the way and that way there when we're doing the water pump, you'll have a clear view of what's going on. It'll be much easier to get in there with the camera. Do you need to take off the fan shroud to do this? No, I wouldn't say that you need to at all. You could try to sneak your hands in there and weasel everything out and I'm sure it'll probably work for you. It's really not that hard to get this fan shroud out of here. So that's the way that we're going to do it. All right. So let's get this clamp off of here so we can get our hose off. Just leave that right down there. I'm just going to grab the hose, give it a little wiggle, see if I can get it to break free from the radiator.

Awesome. Okay, so to get our washer fluid reservoir up, you're going to use something as basic as a flathead screwdriver. You're going to come right along your fan shroud and the washer tank just right approximately right about here. Okay? Just underneath where it kind of goes down at an angle. I'm going to go in with it and then I'm just going to lift up on my washer fluid reservoir. Get my screwdriver out of there and up it comes. The reason for having to do that is because these little nubs right here go into the fan shroud and they kind of lock it in. So when I went in with a screwdriver, one right here, gave it a little pry, it separated them from the fan shroud and it came right up. We're going to just set this aside so it's out of our way and we can continue. So we're going to take out our mounting bolts that hold the shroud to the radiator. I'm going to use a 10 millimeter. I'm just going to use it on my little air gun here. You can use something as simple as a ratchet.

I like the air gun because it provides a little bit of vibration at the same time, which will help break free some rust if you have a rusted condition. Okay. Of course it doesn't seem like it's going to want to come off. I'm just going to try it one more time. See if I can get my socket on that a little further. So when you have a rounded out bolt and your 10 millimeter just isn't working or whatever size it is you're using, you can go with a socket that looks something like this. It's called a twisty socket and it's kind of rifled inside. You can see where it kind of looks like it's a Tom Brady twist there. When you hammer it onto your bolt, it's going to twist and it's going to lock right in and then as you try to loosen, the rifling there is just going to grip in even more and it's going to continue trying to grip as you try to loosen it up. So let's get it on there. At this point I'm going to use my ratchet. Make sure I got it in the off position.

Oh, yeah, gripped right on. That's beautiful. These sockets come in handy more times than not. It's nice to have a full set of them because you never really know when you're going to need them. Could be a big bolt. Could be a small bolt. Get that on there. So we just want to make sure all those bolts came out and they did. So this can move around freely. That's always nice. I'm just going to take one and go right in this top hole right here. Why you doing that, Len? Well, that's a good question because we need to take off this fan clutch still. All right? See that big old nut down there? That screws right onto the water pump itself and so obviously we can't have this thing flopping around in our way. So we're going to grab our tool and we can continue. Okay, so we're going to use our 36 millimeter fan clutch tool. Just goes right on this just like this. This part right here goes into your air chisel. I'm just going to get this right on here. It's ready to go.

We're going to put this on. So it's going to be trying to loosen this nut. So turning it to the left counter-clockwise. There we are. Give this a little spin. I can see the whole nut turning. So that's great. We know that this is ready to come off. Now you want to be careful because when it falls down, you don't want any of these fan blades to go ahead and bonk into your radiator cooling fins. So just have your hands ready to try to catch it. Odds are that it's not going to fall down in that direction and there's quite a bit of space between the two. But it couldn't hurt to at least try. There it is. Cool. So it fell straight down. That's awesome. I'm going to get our tool out of the way. So we'll just get our bolt back out of here. Put that right up there so we can't lose it. Grab our fan shroud. Give it a little lift. Now grab the fan. Get this right out of the way ahead of time. Fan shroud. Here it is.

Here we go, friends. It's time to get our fan shroud back inside the vehicle. I'm just going to bring it right down. So our fan. Don't want that washer fluid reservoir blocking us. There we go. Awesome. Before we go too far, we're going to make sure we get our fan down in there so it's happy and waiting for us. You can even start it on. Just get this started on here a little bit. Get our van shroud lined up where it needs to go right about there. Grab a couple of new bolts because we had access to some. There's one. All right, we're just going to snug all these up and then we can move along.

We're going to grab our washer fluid container. We've got a slot on the bottom and then of course the two up top here. This should slide right in. Just give it a wiggle. Make sure it doesn't come free on the bottom. If it came free on the bottom, then you just missed the hole in the bottom. It's not a big deal. So we've got our coolant reservoir. It's time to re-install. Get this nub right here. It's going to go right down in there. This right here and then your lock slides right in here and locks in. Try to get it on there and there we go. Easy peasy. Take your hose. Fill it up. We're just going to spin this on. If it doesn't seem like it's spinning on very easily, you might've just missed a tooth when you were trying to thread it on. So same tool that we used to take off the fan clutch we're going to use to re-install. I'm just going to turn it so I get a clear view. Get this onto the nut there.

Nice. You don't need to really hammer down on it. You just need to make sure it's bottomed out and then a little extra ... and then that's it because when the engine's turning, it's actually going to continuously want to tighten this. So you don't really have to worry about it loosening up on its own. We can grab our upper hose. Slide it right onto the radiator. Grab our clamps slide it up here. Give it a nice tug. It's not going anywhere. It's exactly where I got it from. Awesome.

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