'92 SL1 cooling fam wont come on

With 95 SL2 the fan was thermostat controlled. It came on a good bit past the halfway mark. When it did, you knew it because you could see the gauge drop. If the AC is not on, the fan was controlled by the thermostat. The fan came on and stayed on when the AC was on.

Hope this helps, Chris

As mentioned many times before with the S-series, the halfway mark on the temp gage means nothing. The fan comes on when the temp sensor reaches 220 deg. I doubt the halfway mark even equals 200 deg at that point.

I've found that my 96SL2 doesn't kick on the fan till the temp is almost 3/4ths then shuts off about 1/2.

hth,

tom @

Well , ok , I was juist concerend that it might be over heating.I try to take care of my cars , although this is my sons car, I have been fixing it,and am new to Saturns.We bought it for $300.00 It needed a clutch, cv joints and thats was it.It has 184K miles on it, sun roof and looked good.I have found the car to be very well engineered and pretty simple to work on SO FAR.....LOL.....Mark PS: on the back of thge motor there are 2 sensors of some kind, one has 2 wires going to it(one yellow) na dthe other has 1 wire .What is the correct postion of these wires?... Mark

Blowing steam and bursting hoses is overheating. Half way on the gauge is nowhere near it.

I've run my 92 SC race car on the track at the top of the red on the temp gauge for 20 minutes with no problems at all. Granted, it's not good to do that if you can avoid it...

Your fan should come on at about 3/4 on the gauge. You can test it by turning on the air conditioning - the fan should come on. Make sure the plastic air dam is still under the car near the radiator as it helps a lot with cooling (wasn't on my race car at the time it was running that hot).

Lane [ lane (at) evilplastic.com ]

They are simple little cars but as for well enginered they should have a Rebuild Engine light that comes on after 200,000km I have always used

100% synthetic oil in all my cars and have had wonderfull luck but my SC1 had to rebuild the engine @ 205,000. My 3 Chryslers had over 350,000kms and my Hyundai had close to 400,000 oh and my Crown Vic went to 400,000 so in short the engine is crap.

I was not talking about the clutch I was talking about the engine Saturn openly admited to me that 99% of all the 1.9L engines have oil ring failure at around 200,000km and all the additives in the world would not prevent this from happening. It took them 9 years to say that they solved the problem and most engines built after 2001 no longer have oil ring failure. But whos to say it still wont happen most 2001's are barley hiting 200,000 km yet. as for the Crown Vic nope definatly never had a clutch unless you modifiy them. As for clutches theres is very few cars with clutches that last over 150,000 its just normal wear and tear. I put 3 in my Daytona and going to be putting a 3rd in the Saturn soon. with 257,000 km.

Lots of people are well past 200,000km (124,274 miles) on their S- series Saturns. BTW SC1 equals SOHC. If you want to bash the cheap SOHC engine be my guess but dont lump all of Saturn together like a bigot. I dont care what Make of car you buy, every car company produces bad models and good models. You're opinion comes from owning the cheapest engine Saturn offerd.

If you need a 3rd clutch in a car with only 257,000km (159,692miles) on it then I'd say its not the Saturn that is the issue. The one s-series that was in my family (hard driven-94-twincam-manual) had over 140k miles on it before being sold and the ONLY serious issue was it needed a new heatercore because the conventional green coolant was old and ate through the aluminum tubing. I've seen plenty of GM vehicles well past

1,100,000km (700k miles) with not much more than a few alternator replacements.

well for your information the 1.9L SOHC and the DOHC had the same bottom end (Short Block) and the same rings they only changed the cylinder head to give them the extra power. Plus the DOHC engine was renowned for having alot of the heads crack around 100,000km. I could go on forever with all the problems with my Saturn as well as horor stories from freinds that have one. Dont get me wrong this car is fun to drive when I can actualy drive it. Being a licenced Macanic is definatly a plus if you own one cause they cheap and easy to fix, they just need alot of fixing.

Sounds like you got a pretty good deal on the car. My 94 SC2 now has

203,600 miles on her. She is my daily driver, and gets me through my 100 mile per day commute here in Colorado. As far as everything going to crap after 200,000 miles...same thing happens with other cars...I have even had brand new cars from the dealer that had motor problems straight from the plant. None of them are perfect, or come close. And with things getting worse...major layoffs at GM and Ford...I don't expect any major improvements anytime soon. I paid $800 for my car 15 months ago with 155,000 miles on it. Of course I put some money into it (and a ton of elbow grease!)...after driving to Michigan from Colorado 3 times in 2 months last summer. I like getting things replaced before they fail.

I will gladly replace my entire motor when the time comes, than be stuck with a car payment. For the gas mileage and safer ride, I will keep driving my S-series and probably add another this summer.

Another place to find great help, if you haven't found it already is saturnfans.com. They are awesome over there too, and helped me learn a ton about my car.

Lori Evans, Colorado

94SC2 Red A Saturn fan for life...cause my life depends on it!

SOHC engines had the head cracking issue, as far as I'm aware. In the 13 years I've been a Saturn owner, I've never heard of a cracked DOHC head (and I've read this newsgroup most of that time too).

Lane [ lane (at) evilplastic.com ]

The computer determines when to turn the fan on. Its based NOT on what you see on your dash panel - that is connected to the top sensor. The computer uses the lower sensor (with the two wires) to determine when the engine is hot. Is your car equiped with A/C? When you turn on your A/C and the compressor engages the fan should come on. Otherwise your fan could be bad. I have gone through two cooling fans in two SC Saturns.

I have also replace the engine's coolant temperature sensor on both of those Saturns. Each time they thanked me with a 5mpg increase in milage.