At 11:52 AM 4/15/2010, Old Volks Home wrote:
>Had a fan switch go bad once, didn't have a spare, so I rigged to have it
>manually switched using a spare rear defogger switch in 1999 and haven't
>switched back since.

Dear Jim,

'Splain me dat, please?  Keeping it that way, I mean -- it's not as
if it's a difficult install.  Why take a chance on cooking the engine
by a lapse of attention (or much worse, a bad reading on the temp
gauge), when there's a perfectly good automatic method to take care
of it?  Would you use a manually operated valve to control cooling
flow through the engine (don't laugh, people have been known to do it
with Atomic 4 marine engines)?

There was a big discussion of this on the list maybe ten years ago
and I was amazed at the number of people who apparently thought that
VW got it all wrong and they needed a supplementary switch to turn on
the fan when the driver felt like it, but even they didn't go
*without* the automatic.  Color me confused...

Yours,
David