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Ah, your radiator has been replaced at some point, yes? You have a radiator which is a universal fit for 240 and 700 series cars. The hole you describe is for a thermal switch which powers an auxiliary cooling fan on the AC condenser of a 700 series (and very late 240s as well, I think). Often, they are plugged with a rubber stopper, as yours seems to be. You could just goop up the plug with some sort of sealant and jam it back in, but I would junk up the switch itself, and get the right sized gasket for it. The switch is made of brass, and will thread into place, making it much more secure than the rubber plug.
This particular switch is also fairly ubiquitous. Not only are they to be found on Volvo 740s and 760s, You can find them set into a fitting in the upper radiator hose of a Saab 900. They are also to be found threaded into the passenger's side inner bottom corner of the radiator of a Saab 9000, and the driver's side inner bottom corner of many Volkswagens. If you poke around, you'll also find them somewhere in the cooling systems of Audis and Porsches (BMW and Mercedes used a similar switch, but of a different size). So, a boneyard run ought to turn one up for you.
You can leave the switch unwired and just use it as a plug (as it was for many years on my car), or you have the option of wiring it up to a fan of some sort, as it was intended: an auxiliary fan that you can cannibalize from a 700 series and put on the condenser, or even a full-fledged electric cooling fan, as I recently did on mine. You'll find that the switches come with a number of different temp ranges, and that some (some Saabs, Volkswagens) are even dual switches which can handle a dual speed fan system.
If you're unable to junk one up, you can order them new, too. It occurs to me that some are threaded and some are just a press-in fit. You'll have to check to find out if your hole is threaded or not. You can see pics of the various switches at www.foreignautopartsonline.com, by looking for...
Volvo: 1990: 740 8-Valve: Cooling System: Auxiliary Fan Switch (for both the threaded and un-threaded types)
VW: 1990: Jetta GL: Cooling System: Auxiliary Fan Switch (for the threaded, dual switch type)
(Note, please: these are sequences of clicks on the websites, not URLs. I was going to paste in the URLs, but they are obnoxiously long).
So, not only might you be able to solve your immediate problem, but you could give yourself the potential for some fun mods later on.
-EdM.
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'90 240DL Wagon 'Lola' -- '72 1800ES 'Galadriel'
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