John,
I agree with Bob Howard, that you should stick a candy thermometer in
the radiator fill neck and see that your temperature gauge on the dash
is telling you the correct temperature. Once you have verified that,
then you can look at the gauge with a little more confidence. As to how
high is too high, as long as the engine is not boiling while the car is
moving, you are NOT overheating regardless of how high the gauge goes (I
have seen the temperature portion of the dual oil pressure/temperature
gauges go past the high end of it's range and start pointing into the
oil pressure portion of the gauge and the engine wasn't boiling). As
soon as the car stops moving and the engine is shut off, it may start to
boil, but that is normal and nothing to worry about. Consider that if
you have a 25% mixture of antifreeze in the coolant, the boiling point
in a unpressurized system like on the TD is around 1040C (2180F) and for
a 50% mixture of antifreeze it is 1080C (2260F), so I would not start
worrying until the needle moved past the 1000C mark. Even then, I would
just keep my eye on the gauge to see if it continues up and how fast. I
run a 850C thermostat in our TD, so once the engine is warmed up 850C is
the minimum temperature we see on the gauge, with excursions up to
between 950C and 1000C. As long as the temperature starts down once the
strain is off of the engine, I am happy.
The poor running could have been a flake of carbon getting lodged in an
exhaust valve for a while and then finally blowing out or sedement from
the float bowl breaking loose and getting stuck in the jet for a bit. I
think that I would do a compression check and re-check the carburetor
settings, but beyond that, as long as the car continues to run all
right, I don't think that I would worry too much about it.
Cheers,
Dave
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