I've installed BIG aluminum crossflow radiators in both of my 62 wagons. I also moved the battery to the driver's side to clear the A/C unit in both cars. Here's a link the radiator page about the delux wagon:
Big Radiator
Looking at the page now, I can see it needs to be updated a bit. I'll post some new(er) pics and spruce up that page a little tonight, or maybe tomorrow night. I used 190* thermostats and I haven't seen anything above 195* since. Both cars have T5 conversions, so this may also keep them a little cooler when in heavy traffic.
The major things I did:
I bought two big aluminum twin core crossflow radiators. I think they were probably made for old '63-'64 390/427 galaxys with header tanks, no filler cap.
I cut away about three inches on each side of the original radiator opening for them to fit.
I rebuilt the bottom of both front radiator supports and cut big notches out of the front end of the frame rails for the tanks. The delux's rad support was originally mashed/damaged, but the repair turned out so well, I cut out the squire's original stamped support beam and copied what I had done to the delux. This mod gave me TWO extra inches of space for the (much larger) fan, as I set the radiators on top of the support beam instead of behind it. In fact I ended up using fan spacers off of a fairmont to get the fans up close to the radiator! There is a GOOD airflow path behind the fan now. I guess I could have used a granada or fairmont long-nose water pump and double pulley and saved myself the trouble of scrounging up the spacers and having a custom short nose double pulley made, but I just now thought of that (and the pulley looks very cool).
I trimmed and rolled the rear edge of the bumper filler/stone gaurds to keep them from blocking airflow to the bottom half of the radiators.
On the squire, I added a small air dam to direct air up into the radiator, behind the bumper. Probably not needed, but i was in a sheetmetal mood.
I also used press-on rubber windlace to cover the edges of all the exposed sheetmetal.
Since niether one of the radiators had filler caps, I used inline fillers in the top hose. Depending on where you get your radiator you can pick and choose where the filler cap goes. If you mount the radiator like mine (on top of the support) but don't want to use an inline filler, you'll need an "elbow pipe" filler to come off the back of one of the tanks.
The hoses! I bent some brazing rods to match the length and path of the top and bottom hoses and headed off to the parts store. I asked if I could "browse" through the hoses to find what I needed. No problem, although on the squire (the most recent conversion), after about fifteen minutes, I said to heck with finding the right molded hose and used a flex universal on the bottom. I suppose I could have gotten fancy and used those BeCool "cut to fit" hoses, but I was running low on beer money. Now that I'm thinking about it, I probably should have written down the part numbers on those hoses...
Rick(wrench)
