[lust4speed]

Seems like I had to re-use the tin pieces from the original hardware with the replacement flaps. Can someone confirm this? If the kit doesn't come with the tin, then it might not be much more work to start from scratch and fabricate something from light aluminum. The original design and backyard quality of the pieces leads me to believe that Pontiac discovered they had a problem at the last moment, and this was an effective piece-meal repair effort to correct it -- but it did work, and Pontiac included it on the early A-bodies with air. As a test, you could stuff foam insulation making a seal around the radiator to core support. The sealing of the bottom of the bumper to the core support is going to take some additional ingenuity. Some day I want to fabricate a custom air dam that not only seals the area from the bumper to the bottom of the core support, but then continues back and finally angles down four to six inches to help block airflow under the car. I was thinking that instead of the dam being near the front bumper, I'd put it back farther just in front of the front wheels. This should help prevent any problem of scraping it going up driveways. Anyway, think it would be very worthwhile to try.

Your photos on the Photobucket site shows the 11 bolt pump - so just the one plate sandwiched between pump body and timing cover. Leave the timing cover and it's dedicated bolts in place and just remove the pump bolts necessary to remove the pump body. When you are positioning the plate back on the timing cover, make sure that the plate seals up nicely to the two rubber seals. This is another area that pays dividends with not having any coolant bypass its correct route. You can also use some Ultra Gray or Right Stuff to seal up any questionable areas inside the pump cavity.

As far as swapping out radiators, that's a tough one. I have a friend that has purchased several custom radiators for his 66 GTO, and from my perspective all have been about the same for cooling. His latest purchase is a large cross-flow aluminum with a custom aluminum shroud and two high capacity electric fans. The assembly is fully polished out and cost him a fortune. He still doesn't run any cooler than my old-school brass desert cooler radiator with the factory A/C stuff along with the 2797 fan clutch. It's not that my old radiator is better, but all properly working large radiators are pretty close in their cooling ability, and my overall system is just more finely tuned.

I have another friend that had a custom aluminum radiator built to his specifications and its core is a full 4" thick 5 core. The thing is massive, and it actually runs hotter than a normal radiator because he can't get enough air through it. Just one of those ideas that looked good on paper, but didn't work out that great.