Burning hours on small things - cooling

Published: Saturday, 27 November 2021

You probably heard saying "Evil is in details" which is largely true and I would say this is completely true in perspective of time. Initially I faced how hours were burning massively on a shell restoration and now.. once engine is assembled fabrication of things around it are even more demanding.

This chapter will cover only:

  • intercooler piping,
  • engine coolant radiator,
  • oil cooler.

So for the beginning I'll show how fabrication went for shrouding cover for engine coolant radiator. To begin with fitted radiator in place it should stay.

Later I cut aluminum sheet thickness of 3mm to see how everything would arrange while having in mind a fact that situation regarding room available is not that good.

I started wondering what size SPAL's would do the job considering there's not going to be too much of cooling. It's turbocharged engine so probably I'm gonna have some additional celsius on top meaning let's put in work phisically largest fans based of situation. The first one is SPAL ~294mm sucking type which should guarantee us ~1430 m³/h of air:

Of course second would sit next to this one but due to alternator I did not had much of room to play so decided to supplement it with another ~268mm fan providing additional 1360 m³/h of air:

As a result it should pass through ~2800 m³/h of air:

Also I wanted to leave so gap between matrix core and shrouding. It happened to be ~12mm which is ok'ish:

At first cover seemed to be a little twisty. These additions made it rigid and also assuered air sucking to be way more efficient:

Another intake manifold has been chosen which has different TB flange orientation:

I also managed to accomodate inter-cooler right in front of coolant radiator:

Complete sandwitch of heat exchangers:

Charge pipe before TB:

Plenty of room now:

Last pipe of charge needed to be fabricated:

Acquired small 9 row oil cooler i.e. whole kit: cooler, hoses, adapter with thermostat:

Front part of the car is quite overloaded with heat exchangers already and for this reason I did not find place for it so it could have ambient air flow. For all that I discussed it with other guy and we came to conclusion it does not require it to work properly. It's already pretty good it exists no big difference where placed. After some minor fabrication for brackets it eventually found it's home:

It actually caused one small problem. Power steering fluid reservoir couldn't fit anymore. Partially due to 02M conversion, partially because of oil cooler.

Some slight adjustment for OE brackets:

And here it is (good wash would not harm too):

Other small bobs and bits. Blank for SAI system:

Front engine bracket welded into single piece. Looks odd, would work fine:

Last piece of prop shaft:

I'll just leave it here:

Achieved quite a lot, still many more to come, will post you soon since everything does not fit in single topic :D

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