Classic Roaster Cooling

[Jack21]

The cooling system is one of the things I seemed to do right the first time.

Got the CR Griffin aluminum radiator and new bracket along with it, but it still required some additional "engineering". The lower brackets needed to be mounted to the frame, and a GM type rubber rad mount used to prevent chafing and movement top and bottom.

Used a piece of hardare store steel shelving wall mount, cut radiator to frame brackets, and fan to radiator brackets, and epoxied them in place with Devcon Z-7 marine epoxy.

Like you, the plastic through-the-radiator mounts for the fan looked like a bad idea; particularly with an aluminum radiator. Got an adjustable fan frame mount from Trak/Pep Boys, and modified it to fit.

The fan is a 16" Scotts unit which includes the shroud as part of the fan. It covers all but about an inch on either side of the fan. Also used foam gasketing between the mount and the radiator to seal it, and prevent contact.

Electrical is a Ron Francis Wire Works fan sender and relay kit. Uses 2 relays. The power side gets juice directly from the battery, and has its own circuit breaker. The sender goes into the water jacket, and needed an additional pipe threaded hole in the intake manifold directly over the water outlet in the head. Since the sender works on a complete-the-ground to turn on the fan, installed an additional complete-the-ground to a dash switch to operate the fan manually if needed.

High capacity water pump is an Edelbrock unit. It needed a little massaging on the bottom for crank balancer clearance, and on the side for power steering pump clearance.

Twin groove March pulleys work great, however am using "Street Rod" ratio water pump pulley. Slightly larger diameter than performance ratio, and moves more water at low RPM.

For lower hoses, used 3 hoses I cut the 90 deg elbows out of, and two pieces of stainless exhaust tubing to connect.

Using Stant 7# cap, and 180 deg Robertshaw thermostat year round.

For coolant expansion and contraction, used a Trak/Pep Boys coolant recovery kit. There isn't so much as a bubble of air in the system, and the coolant recovery bottle level changes about a pint with engine hot or cold.

And it all works. Temp is rock steady at 180 deg unless I'm stuck in traffic in the summer. Then it climbs up to about 210 deg. Typically then, I'll turn on the manual override and bring it back down to 180. 14,000 miles now and absolutely no cooling or overheating hassles.