Car: '96 integra gs-r manual

I was taking a road trip of about 150miles to visit a few friends and had some cooling system issues. Turns out, I had a crack across the top of my radiator in the plastic, and from what I've read around here thats not a terribly uncommon problem.

My temp. guage was acting up as well. When I saw I was overheating, the temp guage was close to the H like it should have been. After letting it all cool off and replacing the coolant in the radiator and spare reservoir, I hit the road again. At this point my temp. guage was almost touching the C. This didn't make any sense to me since it never really moved past that.

Further up the road I got behind a slow-moving truck and dropped to about 40mph. Then I watched the temp. guage go from near C to past the halfway, so I pulled it over and cursed. The radiator was dry again so I convinced myself to fill it up with river water filtered through a shirt. I figured that river water was better than hot air.

I got there and me and a buddy found the crack. Since I was far from home and had to get back in a couple of days, I went ahead and bought a new Modine radiator for it and put it in.


My questions are;

could the plastic have been repaired in any way to avoid buying a whole new radiator?

should I get a new thermostat as well or was it probably just stuck in an air pocket or something? (after the new install, temp guage is reading normally)

should I have gotten a new radiator from Honda or does it really matter since radiators aren't really all that complicated? I doubt the steel of the new Modine vs. the plastic of the stock one is a bad thing.

Thanks