Reply to "radiator questions"

Depends- for instance, 215F is not 'too hot'. My wife's '97 Z-28 routinely runs at 215F and the electric fan doesn't even switch on till 230-235F. Your '72 probably has the early 0-220F water temp gauge. Ford noted that with the early gauge, people didn't really READ the gauge; all they saw was the needle "pegged" near the end of the scale and panicked. So they went for cheap fixes, in several ways. First, they stuck a 5 watt resistor in the gauge wire near the distributor, to lower the gauge reading. (Remove it). Second, they put the temp sensor in a remote location, in the radiator surge tank far away from the engine. (Remove it from the tank & place it in the block where it was on millions of other Fords) Finally, in '73 they changed to a 0-260F gauge. Note that none of these 'fixes' actually lowered the engine water temp, only the needle reading. There are a multitude of ways to coerce your 351C to run below 200, but it seems to make more power and last longer when operated at 200+.