unless it's buried up under a whole lot of front end, radiator replacements are a piece of cake. you shouldn't have a problem.
That's good to know. It doesn't appear to be buried beneath a bunch of things, but there are a couple of fans that are attached to it. Hopefully those will come off pretty easily as well as the hoses that are connected to it. I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Yup, the radiator replacement didn't turn out to be a lot of effort. I have to attribute that mostly to my cousin's experience with replacing a radiator before. I'm sure it would have taken me a lot more time if I were fixing it myself this past weekend.
We probably spent about 3 hours on the whole thing. We didn't have much trouble finding and taking off all the screws connecting the radiator to the frame of the car. We had to disconnect the 2 fans that were attached to the radiator and reattached them to the new radiator. We put in the new radiator (we ordered a new one over the internet), reconnected everything, and filled the radiator all the way up.
After starting the car, the temperature gauge shot up to the "H" area after a few minutes of running the car, so we knew there was still something wrong. We found a leak in one of the connections at the bottom of the radiator. We took care of that with a new plastic o-ring and some teflon tape. There also must have been a big air pocket in the radiator. After filling it up and running the car for a few more minutes, we found that the fluid level was low again. We topped off the radiator fluid once more, and temperature gauge finally stayed at normal which is a little less that half way between C and H fo rthis car. There were no more leaks, and the car appears to be running fine now.