Cooling system improvements incl. Allison's aluminum TBH

[KevAndAndi]

We're getting ready for our first participation in a (very casual) car show this coming Saturday. (We got the car in Oct. 2014 and have only driven it a couple of times, due to the brutal winter and my desire to keep the car off the road and get certain issues sorted out.) I spent this past weekend addressing some cooling system items. For the first time, I drained the system. Then I flushed it with the garden hose, using the Prestone T. Ran the car for 15 or so minutes while flushing. I kept watch under the glove box, for fear that the heater valve would start leaking because of the modest pressure, but that never happened. Then I drained the water.

I took this opportunity to install the new coolant-hose portion of the blue silicone hose kit I bought from Autoricambi, which also supplied our new coolant expansion bottle, replacing the original which was discolored and crumbling. Allison's supplied our new stainless steel heater pipe, which went on without too much of a problem. I did run into an issue with the heater core fittings. The return hose to the heater pipe was not in good shape and was damaged during removal. I intended to replace it, but I found that the return fitting on the firewall was heavily corroded and deformed. I decided that, for the time being, I would therefore bypass the heater core. Midwest-Bayless supplied a new coolant temperature sensor (as I suspected the old one wasn't up to snuff) as well as a new radiator fan thermoswitch (which had gone bad and wouldn't shut off).

I was looking forward to replacing the unsightly throttle body heater plate with the billet aluminum replacement I bought from Allison's. This is where things went slightly awry. Fortunately, when I received the item many weeks ago, I immediately installed the fittings that came with it. In addition to the two hose fittings, there is a bleeder screw, which actually gives the TBH a reason-for-being - in a warm-weather car - as it presumably will come in handy at burping time. Unfortunately, some garage gremlins got into my box and made off with the supplied cork gasket and nuts and washers. Getting another gasket is easy enough, but I'm not certain about the size of the four fasteners on the TBH plate. Does anyone know? I would actually prefer anyway to get rid of the studs and nuts arrangement and replace them with one-piece flange, hex, or Allen bolts. The existing studs are rusty and one is seized onto its nut.

I went ahead and installed the billet aluminum plate on top of the old gasket as a temporary measure, as it adds some bling for the car show; I just hope it doesn't leak. Similar to what I saw on another thread here, the gunk under the old plate was nasty: rusty blobs, chips, sediment, and crust. I cleaned it out as best I could, but I will have another go at it when I replace the gasket.

With the silicone hoses, new hose clamps, and the aluminum TBH plate, the engine bay looks sufficiently dressed up for the show. I will attempt to post some pictures below, which will be a first for me on this forum. I will have to do it from my phone; we'll see if that works.

[KevAndAndi]

Hopefully, there will be a photo below of the TBH gunk:

[KevAndAndi]

Looks like that worked, but I need to work on resizing pictures.

Here's the engine bay with new brake fluid reservoir and hoses, vacuum and coolant hoses, coolant expansion tank, and billet aluminum TBH plate.

[KevAndAndi]

It appears that the photos are so large they are getting cut off, and I can't seem to resize them on my phone. I'll try to repost when I have access to a computer.

EDIT: I resized the pictures and have finally figured out how to use Photobucket.