QuestionThe electric cooling fan on my '92 town & country (3.3L) seized up. I bought and installed a new fan motor, and still the motor does not come on. It is only a 2 wire connection, black to black, and green to green. I even ran the engine for a while thinking it was temperature controlled. Is there something else I should be looking at for problems? I've heard that there is a "fusible link" or relay that may be causing the problem, but not sure exactly where or what to look for. I used a test light on it to see if the fan was even getting "juice" and the light came on, however, it was quite dim. Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
AnswerHi Tod,
You may not have noticed that my expertise listing doesn't include the van models, so I am limited in my resources to give you help. Based upon my knowledge of the passenger car series, I believe that by '92 many of those vehicles had what is called a power distribution center under the hood. With that center all the fusing was done by maxi-fuses and regular fuses, the maxi-fuses replacing the fusible links. Also the fan relay and other relays were placed in the center. If this were not the case, then you would find relays mounded on the driver side inner fender shield and also a harness attached to the main + battery cable clamp that included a wrap of multicolored (but each with only a single color code) wires that are the fusible links. Unfortunately I am specializing in the cars, so I don't have any of the wiring diagrams for the '92 vans. I do have a manual for '93 T& C that shows the relays to be on the fender shield, but for that year they had changed over to a high and low speed fan, with four wires, and two relays for the fan. So even that diagram isn't applicable to your '92. Chrysler generally powers the fan by a relay, and in the case of the fan relay it will have four wires: a heavy gauge gray(that is coming from the + pole of the battery via a fusible link or a maxifuse (30 amp)) and a heavy gauge light green(that is the one that goes to the fan motor), and two lighter duty wires:one white, and one dark blue/pink, which are the wires that operate the relay's activation coil by means of the engine control computer which receives a signal from the coolant temp sensor that alerts the computer to activate the relay coil when the coolant reaches a preset temperature. So, if you could check the relays that are mounted on the driver side fender shield or strut tower for one with that combination of wires then you would have found the fan relay. The gray wire should have 12V on it's pin of the plug at all times.
and when the temp of the coolant gets sufficiently high to activate the relay coil circuit then the 12V should be sent across the relay contacts to the light green wire so as to power up the fan. If the neon test light was dim, it suggests to me that the relay contacts are possibly burned and thus not passing the full voltage necessary to run the fan motor. So try and find the fan relay, then check those pin on the plug for its relative brightness (with one of the wires of the glow lamp gounded to the engine block or the - post of the battery) compared to what you say at the green lead at the fan plug-in. Of course the engine will need to be warmed up sufficient to energize the relay (watch the temp gauge till it gets in H range). If the neon glows equally brightly, then maybe trace the black ground wire to the place where it is grounded to the body and thus check that the fan motor ground is clean, shiney, and tight.
Roland
