overheating, repaired, should i go further?

[Brock96gst]

this weekend i left to go visit friends in south carolina. about 1 hr into the drive my temp guage started climbing fast. i quickly turned on the heat trying to get it to drop some what until i could get out of traffic. with the heat on it was dropping only going higher, i was approaching an exit 1/4 mile up so i shut the engine down left the key in aux position and coasted to the gas station. i recently changed t-stat a couple weeks ago, so i'm thinking i'm screwed. i waited until the engine cooled down enough to touch and removed the t-stat.
reinstalled and filled radiator to spec. let idle with cap off and heat on. she burped twice and idled about 15 min no problem. thinking all air is out of sytem reinstalled cap and started back on my journey. 45 min later getting off highway and come to stop light. as soon as i stopped it jumped up to hot so fast i couldnt do anything. waited 15-30 seconds on light to change and drove 50 yards to gas station and parked it. had my friends pick me up. 5 hrs later i go back to check her out. water still to spec so i drove about 10 miles to my buds house and parked her. today i flushed system with 10 min flush treatment. flushed again with water, then cooled down and back flushed. installed new radiator cap.
filled 70 water and 30 antifreeze left t-stat out. tested, never went above operating temp. so i started my 2 hr journey home. made it back home with no problems. so tomorrow i'm going to get 180 deg t-stat. is there any other preventave maint i should do so i dont break down again on the road?is there anymore testing i should do or componets to replace?

 

[Eclipse45150]

First check to make sure your fan is coming on, it should kick on when the temp gauge is about half to three quarters of the way up, it will be the one on the right if you are looking down to the radiator from the front of the car, if it doesnt, which in my case it didnt I rewired it so the wires ran straight from the brain box to the fan (my wire connector went bad) if that kicks on check your sensors on the bottom of the thermostat housing, one is the temp sensor, on is... I forget but it has somethin to do with the cooling, those arent to expensive so I would say prob just to replace them to be sure they are working. If all that doesnt fix it try replacing the thermostat again to be sure it isnt a bad one. And if all that work, I would say your next step would be water pump, last step would be new ecu. Thats from best case to worse, also inexpensive to expensive. Hope this helps

 

[Eclipse45150]

Sorry I wasnt that exact earlier, long night at the bar. Basically if its working dont fix it but I would still check the sensors to make sure they arent corroded, both are like a total of twenty so its not bad to go ahead and chenge them

 

[Brock96gst]

thanks for the info, i'm going to try replacing t stat first. stopped by mitsu dealer after work and picked up oem t stat. priced the sensor at the t stat housing. it was $50.00.
I'm going to try t stat and go from there. again, thanks for the input.

 

[markGSX]

Turn on your AC and check to make sure both fans come on. If it's not, use some jumper leads directly off the battery to the harness and see if the fan motor works. If it does, its probably the sensor that went bad. No sense in paying $50 at the dealer since I think any autozone/pep boys/kragen has it around 20 bucks. In my case it was my fan motor that died... $36 at Kragen easy replacement.

 

[Brock96gst]

flushed system once again and installed oem t-stat. tested, got engine to operating temp. radiator fan cycled. test drove 20 min. operating properly.
so i dont really now what procedure fixed the problem, but after replacing radiator cap, t-stat and flushed system 3 times it fixed my problems.