I didn't grab the bolts that held these horns to the car when I picked them up from Pull-A-Part so I went to the hardware store to find somereplacements. They were metric and I found a #7 that fit. When I got home I found that it fit one side, though it was loose, and actually fell right out of the other side. I went back and the size was actually between a #7 and #8. The guy at the hardware store helped me look for about 10 minutes and we both decided it must be some strange thread. I bought a couple of standard bolts, because no one wants any stupid metric bolts on their car anyway, and retapped the holes. I have since learned that these bolts were supposed to be the very coarse threaded, body bolt types.
This is what I ended up with. Today, with my dad's '71 parked right next to our '71, I realized that I don't think these horns will fit. I think they may stick out too far. I'll have to wait and see.
Then came the big problem for the day: The Radiator. Many radiators bolt to the core support and the shroud bolts on after. In this case, the radiator is installed inside the shroud sitting on rubber supports and the shroud is bolted to the car.
The problem came when I realized my new radiator was thicker than my old one. The new radiator is approximately 2 1/2" inches deep and the old radiator was somewhere around 1 1/2". It took quite some time to figure this out, but what I have is a heavy duty radiator. The parts house did not distinguish this fact. I was simply told there were two kinds, one with air conditioning and one without. In reality there were several available and the one that my car came with was the non-heavy duty with air conditioning. Fortunately I had dad's car right next to mine and I was able to measure his radiator to see that his was much thinner than mine and since he sold the car new as a salesman in '71, we know that it is original. The real confusion came in to play when I found that others have not had the same problem I was having. Supposedly, the heavy duty radiator should fit in the same shroud. The only difference should be the length of the rubber supports. At first I wasn't sure if I had the right radiator, what kind of radiator I had, if I was installing it correctly, if I had the right fan shroud or if Pontiac originally offered different types of fan shrouds that corresponded to different radiators. It took me all day long to find the answers to these questions. I finally found that there was only one type of shroud made. Different rubber supports were made for the heavy duty and non heavy duty. The reason my shroud won't fit is that the aftermarket company that made the radiator did not make it correctly. I eventually talked to another person that had recently done the exact same swap to a 1971 Pontiac. His heavy duty radiator bolted right up.
If you look next to the yellow sticker you can see where the radiator is pushed as far into the shroud as it can go and is making contact with the sunken area of the shroud. There was no more room to give any relief.
Here you can see how the shroud is sitting too far back to align with the holes.
I attempted to make the radiator go under this lip to give a bit of extra room, but it could not be done.
Because the top rubber supports would not fit I had to leave them out temporarily until I can get the correct size. This picture shows where they would fit, sandwiched between the radiator and shroud.
The fan had plenty of room despite the fact the shroud would not move back any further
It took the entire day to get to this conclusion, but I eventually notched the holes in the shroud to make them slots. This allowed me to mount the shroud in its new location.
This was an exceptionally frustrating situation and also why I dislike dealing with many aftermarket companies that say they make model specific parts that end up being generic parts that are "supposed" to fit a wide variety of models. Because I am eventually going to try to see how many miles per gallon I can get from this massive old engine I will, down the road, most likely end up converting the clutch fan to an electric fan setup. In that case I will have to make an entirely custom shroud from scratch, so that means this one is not a huge deal if it isn't perfect for now.
