Here's my little contribution to the forum for now.
Seeing as I had broken blades on my stock fan I used it as an excuse to put the Volvo 940 electric fan in. I wasn't a fan of the idea of removing the auxiliary fan, especially when every German car I saw in the yard always had an extra one. It's always nice to have a backup if nothing else...
First up, for all that is sacred and holy, don't forget to disconnect the battery ground before doing ANY electrical work on the car.The way I chose to do it was add a whole new circuit to the fuse box, and use the factory relays to trigger the Volvo 2 speed fan switch.
So what I did was grab these bits from the Junkyard:
From the Volvo's:
[LIST=Volvo]
- Volvo Fan from a 940, though I hear some Taurus' have excellent fans
- Volvo 940 2 speed fan switch mounted on passenger side by the headlight
- as much length of the wires going to each as possible.
From BMW's:
[LIST=BMW]
- Pulled 4 or 5 pins out of the fuse box, I just went for the largest gauge wires I could find, or any with multiple wires crimed into 1 end.
- Cut the connector off of the Auxiliary fan, getting as much of the wire as possible
- Cut the chassis end of the auxiliary fan wiring, again try and get as much length as you can.
Optional from the yard, 4 pin relays, especially if they are the 30A type you can get from Autozone that have mounts. I chose to buy these from Radioshack new. Relays are for having the factory low and high speed relays to close and ground the fan switch to active your fan.
Fuse box:
The fuse box bits are easy, there are 2 screws that hold it together, one is easily visible, the other is under the K8/Fog light relay or bottom right.
If you look closely at the bottom, my pictures don't show this, you'll see 4 small plastic clips, pop those back and push down at the same time, when you pull the box apart you'll see why you do this.
The easiest way to do this is to pull as much as you can up on it, and start snipping wires until you get enough room to work. I'd try and leave a decent bit of length on anything you cut.
Those clips you popped loose a few minutes ago? The underside of the fuse box has a long plastic clip, if you pull on it now it should slide out, this locks all the wires in place on the fuse box.
With that plastic clip out you can fairly easily pull out the wires you need, you want something that is 16-14 gauge, I ended up using one with 2 red wires and yellow stripes that I later soldered together and put red heat shrink over (red is the same color the wire this will get soldered too, hence the color).
Here is the clip removed:
And my already modified wire ready to go in the fuse box
As far as pulling anything from the volvo, to get to the longer length of wires you'll need to remove the headlight from the passenger side. The wiring bundle goes down under the bumper just under the headlight.
Installing it allI don't think I need to show how to mount it as it's been done before. I trimmed the shroud and used some self taping screws for the shround to the but of aluminum that extends off the radiator.
You'll notice in my pics that I have 5 extra screws in the fan to the shroud. I did this because the 2 volvo screws failed to hold the fan in one day with high winds and the only thing holding the fan was the cups at the bottom.
Now here is the fun part, all of the damn wiring! What I did was pull the grill off and the headlights on the drivers side. I spliced into the wiring going to the Auxiliary Fan plug and soldered in the one from the junkyard, making it with 2 connectors. The brown is a ground wire and not required, but I soldered it all in so I didn't have to deal with 1 connector not working the AUX fan correctly if I didn't pay attention to what was hooked to what. Just match the colors up and solder and cover the wires.
Next up you'll want to make sure you have enough length of 16 gauge red wire to run from the fuse box to where you'll be mounting this switch ( I chose the passenger side under the headlight cover). Pop apart the fuse box like I mentioned before, put your wire up through, push it into Fuse 25 (if you're on a vert that spot is used, 26 would require populating it from the main board of the fuse box as well).
As far as getting the wire out of the fuse box, I chose to just drill a small hole in the bottom of the box, run the wire through (leaving slack to open he fuse box up again) and then putting epoxy to hold the wire in there and avoid chaffing. If I did it again I'd make the hole big enough to allow fitting of some kind of wire covering as well.
Next up, run your cut AUX fan side of the cable to where you have your relays going (again I put my on the passenger side next to the fan switch). I had to extend my wires, and I didn't need the brown ground so I just cut those and extended the black and red.
Those are all the wires that need to be run if you keep the fan switch and relays side by side, at this point I put some split tubing wire covering to keep the wires from rubbing and splitting and then fitting some parts into the factory wire tie downs and other parts with zip ties. Make sure you
check for clearance with the AUX fan if you do it my way.
The wire going to the fuse box plus directly into the fan switch on the right, the E-fan obviously plugs right in.
The last bit is setting up the relays. The red and black wires we tapped into on the AUX fan plug are positive, Red goes to the high speed relay, black low speed, these are all running 12v through them, the fan switch needs ground to turn on. You can see the dilemma here.
The easiest solution to me was to throw in 2 relays, 1 for the high speed, 1 for the low. Here is how I wired them.
I need to add a note here, to diferentiate between the 12v low/high speed relay wires and grounds I added bits of heat shrink. If you have the ability to complete change the wire colors, I'd go that route personally, I did not so I went this way instead.
Fan Switch wiring to relay:
Yellow with brown stripe = High speed, ground to activate.
Yellow with Green stripe = low speed, ground to activate.
Chassis wiring to Relay:
16 gauge Red (AUX fan color) with White & Black heat shrink from drivers side = high speed fan relay, has 12v
16 gauge Black (AUX fan Color) with White heat shrink from drivers side = low speed fan relay, has 12v
2x 4 pole relays are used.
1 relay has Red White Black to pin 85
GND to pins 86 & 87
Y/Brn to pin 30.
2nd relay has Black & white wire to pin 85
GND to pins 86 & 87
Y/GRN to pin 30
What this all is doing is this:
If the low speed relay is tripped by either the radiator temp sensor or the AC switch Relay 2 will also trip causing the fan switch to go to ground and kick on the main fan.
If the engine still gets hotter and causes the 2nd stage of the temp sensor to trip the high speed relay, relay 1 will also trip and turn the fan on to high speed.
The Great thing about doing it this way is you get even more air flow through the rad/condenser AND it also comes on with the a/c switch. I wanted this for when I'm working in Palm Springs and it's July. At 110F I was having trouble keeping the car cool with the a/c running with the stock setup, so NO WAY was I going to remove a fan completely.
Topic: Volvo fan while keeping AUX fan. (Read 5189 times)