How To Replace Radiator Fan Clutch 1973-91 GMC Jimmy

Brought to you by 1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet.

Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20+ years of experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly, that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video, we're going to show you how to replace a fan clutch on this 1986 GMC Jimmy. Really, replacing a fan clutch in pretty much any rear-wheel or 4-wheel drive vehicle where the fan is mounted to the front of the engine, it's going to be pretty much the same. This truck, you just need a half-inch wrench to perform it.

One of the first things you want to do is disconnect your negative battery cable. So fan clutch replacement. Basically, the vehicle has V8, V6 engines where the front of the engine is facing forward, and it has a fan mounted to the engine as opposed to a fan mounted to the radiator. Your fan, on many vehicles as you can see, can turn on its own without the engine going. Okay. What this fan has is called a fan clutch, and the clutch is heat-activated. So as the fan's pulling air through the radiator, if that air heats up a lot, the clutch engages, and then the fan turns faster with the engine. As the engine is cooler, the clutch allows the fan to not turn as fast. Therefore, the engine makes power without the fan robbing power from the engine. What can happen is these clutches basically wear out, and the symptom usually is that when you're sitting still for a prolonged period of time, your engine will heat up.

So I'm going to show you in this video how to remove your fan and fan clutch and replace it. So the first thing you can see here, there are four nuts here that we're going to remove. Okay, and on this vehicle, it appears that they are half-inch. Okay. As long as your belts are tight, you should be able to loosen these up pretty easily. Okay. And you also see you can see this blade of the fan, and then this blade is all the way down here. Okay, that's usually how it is on these fans. These two are close together. They have different sections of the fan where the fan is wider apart, so you can work more easily in there

Okay. Now with those four bolts off, the fan comes off the front. Okay, I'm going to turn it over here to get the wide part of the blade up. If I did it correct, up and out. And now basically, there's four more bolts, one, two, three, and four. You can take those out, and then the fan clutch separates from the fan. Okay, so here's your fan clutch. Okay, so here we have our original clutch, and this was the replacement from 1AAuto. A little bit of difference. There's slots in these rather than holes. It doesn't make that much of a difference. Everything still goes together the same way. Visually, they're a little bit different, but this is going to go in. It's going to work and function correctly.

We do offer both a standard-duty and a heavy-duty option. Heavy-duty option is if you do a lot of towing or if you're in a hot climate like Arizona or Texas or something like that. Okay. This vehicle, I'm going to put this one back in because this one still is fine. It's just a subject vehicle to show you how to do it. So fan back in and then the bolts Okay. Now you want to kind of push this on and just hand-tighten the bolts more and get them on there nice and evenly, and then you can tighten them with a wrench.

We hope this helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet. Please feel free to call us toll free, 888-844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the internet and in person.