Well this morning it started out as its ugly old self. This evening it ends up with a slightly re-arranged engine bay, a different rad and an electric fan.
I’ll have pics tomorrow, but I removed the cruise (didn’t work anyways), moved the charcoal canister to replace its spot so that I had room to run new rad hoses. The rad came from a 1990 Dodge Caravan V6 and seems to cool very well in comparison to the stock rad, and I haven’t even given the system a flush and added the water wetter yet.
The purpose of this you ask? Well besides getting rid of the shitty stock engine fan, I now have TONS of room to run my intercooler and piping. I will begin to chop up the uppipe tomorrow and run my piping. Mounting the intercooler should be simple enough as there is a ton of room in front of this rad to mount it any way I like. While the intercooler goes in, the larger SOHC KA24 throttle body will be port matched to the intake via a Dremel and what I’m sure will turn out to be many cut knuckles and long streams of expletives that will make my neighbours retrieve their kids from their front yards.
Oh but it doesn’t stop there. My front shocks are finally here, so the front suspension is coming apart and being reassembled with the shiny new Suspension Techniques springs and Tokico shocks. As for the rear end, well everything old is new again. I will be removing my old rear end that I temporarily stuck under a parts car and reinstalling it along with the Sustech springs and some new Monroe Sensatracs (I’m still waiting for my tokico rears, but they are easy to swap).
I realize this isn’t anything too dramatic, but I took my car from stock and in about 6 hours modified and installed a rad that was never meant to be there and made it work extremely well (well with a little help from Glenn, Supradevil).
So yeah, the transformation has begun. I’ll be sure to get pics up tomorrow. :E
P.S. The Monroe Sensatracs will only be new because I blew the old ones and they are stuck giving me new ones because of their lifetime warranty. Suckers… :E
Just to let you guys know, water wetter doesn’t work with coolant. If you want it to work you must use pure water. You can’t use this in the winter though.
umm water wetter just removes the surface tension of any liquid. Antifreeze just has less surface tension than water so the difference is less.
A drop of dish soap does the same thing for a fraction of the cost but be careful not to use to much as it can froth up. I ran 2 drops of Palmolive, aroma therapy with lavender and ylang ylang essences in my KA and never had another problem with overheating in the summer.
In this second pic you can see where the charcoal canister was taken from beside the rad and stuck back by the battery.
Tonight I pulled out the uppipe and chopped it apart to get it ready for the intercooler piping. A few different positions were tried with the intercooler, still not quite sure exactly how it will go. I was going to install the throttle body…but somehow it has gone missing from my car. I really hope that it has just been misplaced and someone didn’t help themselves to it.
Water wetter should work just fine with coolant. I am probably going to run it with just water though since it is supposed to run about 10deg cooler. I’ll just have to remember to drain it and replace with coolant when the temperatures start dropping.
Yeah it does a bit but with just water it can drop your coolant temperature 25 degrees. I do welding work on some of the cars for a guy that races 2000 hp alcohol dragsters and we were talking to the guys at best buy performace.
I was under the impression that the boiling point of straight water would be exceeded on the street under high load conditions. I guess with enough water wetter it would be ok though…
Under pressure water cools better than water and coolant mixed. The boiling point is higher as far as I know also.
I picked up all of my intercooler pipe today and started piecing the system together. Hopefully I will have it running tomorrow night before the UC meet. Putting the system together is the easy part, I just have to build and weld together a piece to replace my uppipe and attach two nozzles as well as the BOV. Stupid me, I bought aluminum for my piping, but I’m going to need about a foot of 2.5" steel pipe for this last piece before the throttle body.
All in all it’s looking pretty good though. :E Too bad that the event was cancelled, I was hoping to really test this out out there. Oh well, no real rush to get my suspension in then. I can go out to the Grand Prix on Saturday also.
I can apply some of my Chemical Engineering background here:
As you raise your coolant pressure, you raise the boiling point.
As you raise the glycol concentration in water, you raise the boiling point and lower the freezing point (for anything below 60% glycol by weight, once you go past that the freezing point curve does a weird reversal).
As you lower the glycol concentration in water, you raise the specific heat and raise the thermal conductivity of your coolant mixture. THIS is the reason that running pure water offers the best cooling.
The surface tension of your coolant mixture decreases as you raise your glycol concentration.
You know what else is fantastic? My intercooler is in and kicking ass! I’ll get pics up later today if it ever stops raining…but everything went pretty smoothly when installing it last night. I can’t seem to find any leaks anywhere but I’ll do a full leak test today with soap and water.
As for power…well there is definitely a difference. Driving around in the rain last night the car kept spinning right through third and half of fourth. The car used to spin in the rain a bit in third before, but now you can roll on at 2,500rpm in third and it will break loose when the boost comes on. :E
I can’t wait to get the car out to the track now. :rolleyes:
