Hey, Armand, what exactly were you doing when this brainstorm struck you
anyway???
O.K., enough of this lighthearted kidding. What exactly was this idea
supposed to accomplish? I don't think hot air under the hood is a problem
per se, but only indicates some lack of air flow. I have wondered myself
just what percentage of cooling is by convection directly from the engine
surfaces and how much from the radiator, water cooling route., but I don't
think it's very much, at least not in the case of the Tiger. So it seems
like the best idea is to blow fresh cool air through the radiator, not hot
air from the engine compartment. Also, even if you take the mechanical fan
out, there's not much room left for an electric fan. Maybe you could get
two smaller ones on either side of the water pump. I never gave this idea
much thought, but it may be just barely feasible. Of course, since it's
real easy to reverse the direction of a DC motor, you could give your idea
a try. Who knows, maybe it might surprise us. Perhaps you could reverse it
depending on the wind direction; blow forward with a tail wind and blow
backwards with a head wind? (It's even hard for me to know where
tongue-in-cheek ends and serious suggestion begins, so don't ask me which
is which.)
As to some of the stuff I've done on my car, I fabricated an aluminum sheet
metal (single) piece to form a barrier between the bottom of the valance
and the radiator and I also added a chin spoiler from an '89 Taurus. Both
of these contribute to good cooling when you're moving, but don't help at
all when you're not. I have an electric fan mounted in front of the
radiator (blowing into the engine compartment) to take care of this
situation. A big mechanical fan also does the trick, but wastes HP at
speed. Ideas I believe in, but haven't done yet are to complete the bottom
part of the fan shroud and do Tom Hall's suggestion of a rubber piece to
block the space between the radiator and the cross-member. These ideas both
address the problem of cooling when the car is not moving, but don't help
(or hurt) high speed cooling.
It looks like the list is making some real progress on this perennial
question; at least no one is publicly suggesting taking out the thermostat
and installing a restrictor plate, cutting fins off the water pump
impeller, or other remedies to keep the water from going through the
radiator too fast. Now that's progress!!
I would like to suggest to the organizers of TUXXIII that they include the
"COOL TIGER" competition in this year's events. At an elevation of 6000
feet in the heat of the day, the competition could get pretty rough. Last
Tiger to puke out its coolant wins. (No fair welding shut the radiator cap!!).
With tongue firmly in cheek,
Bob
B9472134, SHO, etc.
At 09:22 AM 4/25/98 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi all I was thinking about our under hood heat problem with these tigers
>and I got an idea this morning. What if we install and electric fan that
>can be reversed by a dash board switch. So when we are stopped in traffic
>we could reverse the fan and blow that hot air from under the hood out the
>front of the radiator. Then when we get going again we could change
>directions of the fan so it works normaly. I think it would be better to
>remove the stock fan altogether so it doesn't interfere with the reversing
>of the electric fan. Any thoughts on this, do you all think this might
>work?
>
>regards Armand Ritchie
>
>ritchie@mcn.org
>Armand & Lorie Ritchie
>
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