[Evansa22]

Trying to find where the thermostat is located to replace with a 180* . Is it in the water outlet of the engine?
Thanks

[laynlo15]

Front cover where the top rad hose comes in, right in the front. Take the small hose off that comes from your coolant tank and clamp it off so it won't leak. I believe there are 3 bolts that need to be removed and then it comes right out after the neck comes off. Take a picture of what your doing so you remember how it goes back. Not a big deal but you will loose a little coolant when you remove it.

[Evansa22]

Awesome, thank you! That's what it was showing but it didn't call it out as thermostat so I was unsure.

[BuddyLee]

I did this with the Grand National 30 years ago but has since forgotten why. What is the reason why I would do this for the 2SS? An if this is a common swap I have often wondered why this is not done at the factory.

[BlackbeastSS2]

Originally Posted by BuddyLee

I did this with the Grand National 30 years ago but has since forgotten why. What is the reason why I would do this for the 2SS? An if this is a common swap I have often wondered why this is not done at the factory.

From my experience and what I understand is that it simply opens your flow of coolant into the engine sooner. Under low loads it definitely helps and will help keep your engine cooler but in reality if you want better or cooler temps it’s really based off the size of your radiator. Get a bigger rad and lower thermostat is the ticket IMO. Lower engine heat temps helps with getting your optimal power level, high heat temps/soak is a killer in power.

[BDPhoto519]

This is a debatable subject... Which is why you dont see it as common a mod as before.

Not overheating is important, but running too cool for efficent combustion is also not good for power.

To each their own.

[cmitchell17]

Anytime you cool your combustion chamber, you are allowing horsepower to escape in the form of heat. It's a necessary evil that we have to cool engines but we have to because the materials we make them from have temperature limits.

You may be able to argue that using a lower thermostat will help the combustion chamber run at a lower temp and help keep knock away. Not sure if you can find any detailed analysis on weather or not you would lose more horsepower due to overcooling the combustion chamber or lose more power by not having the optimal timing because you had to retard it so much because of the knock.

My suspicion is having suboptimal timing from the knock will probably take away a lot more horsepower than running a 160F thermostat instead of the stock 194F. That being said its not something I would do because I think its a "band aid" fix.

There is also a separate issue of the cooler combustion chamber effecting combustion quality and speed and therefore timing advance, but that is also probably negligible.

Think of how bad your engine runs cold when warming up, this is (in part) because of the exact reason above, the cold thermal mass of your engine block and cold coolant is "sucking" horsepower from the combustion chamber.