Hey guys, I am in the process of restoring a 69 4spd L78 car and I needed to know what the correct fan is for the car? Does it use a fixed fan,a clutch fan or what.How many blades is it? The car does have the BB rad support of course, but there is no clearance for the clutch fan that I did have for it.And is it suppose to have a 4 row or 3 row radiator?


Thanks,
Kevin

Fixed fan, the clutch fans were only offered on A/C cars or cars ordered with HD cooling. The fixed fan had five aluminum blades that deformed under load and made a lot of noise, so even racers were not enamoured of them. The viscous fluid fan clutch had a seven blade fan that was thermally controlled. Racers didn't like them because they were heavy. Since you had a 1969 375 horse motor it had solid tappets; therefore it didn't have A/C as that was not allowed.

Big Dave

Kevin!

Email me for pics of what I understand to be the correct 5-blade non-clutch fan.
Very hard to find. To date I haven't seen any un-molested survivior '69 L78 Novas,
let alone several, to remove any doughts of what
it should look like.

I have one but it doesn't seem to be "correct"...but close.

Wayne

Sorry I didn't read the part about the number of cores. I believe by 1969 they were all four core radiators whether or not they ordered with A/C or HD Cooling option. I know they were at the end of the production year, but that was a change made to the car’s specs during the 1969 production run; so early cars (by build date) could still have been made with a three core radiator (but I suspect not a lot of them).

Big Dave

1969 and 1970 BB(L78/L34) Novas all used a fixed 5 blade steel fan...the fan blades were offset.....2 close together and then the other 3....and yes they were noisey! Most guys back in the day took them off and replaced them with a flex fan. The radiator was a 3 core unit for all BB applications...over the years many were changed to 4 core by local shops, etc. The original 5 blade fans have a "w" stamped on the blade...there are pics of this fan on Steve's Nova Site....

...they are hard to come by because so many guys threw them away....

wilma