Rover Dealer is NOT your friend...

 

New radiator is in. I must say the first time doing this was NOT fun. It just took me a long time to find all the access points to remove nuts and screws. Even with the RAVE manual. I did not expect to have to remove the grill, the turn-lights, horns, etc. Once I got all that loose, removing the cooler core from the plastic mounting bracket was a pain - it slides in that slot. Getting it back in was not bad, except the cooler core had to slide back into the plastic mount and I had to make a cut in the top of the plastic to drop it in the mount.

It took about 4-5 hours to get it out and the new rad back in. I stopped at dark and the last thing I did was CAREFULLY screw in the brass plug under the lower hose. I thought I over tightened it because it was going in then got REALLY easy to turn. I barely slept that night worrying I would have a leak.

The next morning I filled and bled the system with 50/50 green Prestone and I got 2 gals mix in. It runs at proper temp, no leaks, heater is blasting HOT air, so I am keeping fingers crossed.

Having the front raised helped a lot. My drive has a good slope, so this worked well - the fill tank was raised above the bleed hole, and the bleed hole was higher than the engine block - so air went up.

One thing I learned, when flushing the system at first I only pulled the lower hose from the radiator. I needed to pull that hose PLUS the lower hose from the T-stat, because the t-stat hose drains the block. LOTS more coolant came out when I pulled BOTH lower hoses.
Thanks for all the help.

 

I was able to put 2.25 Gallon 50/50 mix. I bet i have a lot of air in the system now. I did bleed from the top screw.

I changed radiator, fan, belt. Took lot longer than I thought. Specially finding the tool to open the clutch. Tried to rent from Advanced, Autozone, O'Railly they all had mostly for American cars clutch remover way bigger than 36mm. Finally found a tool kit at Harbor Freight with a 36mm but had to get creative to open the clutch.