Small Diameter Water Pump Pulley from ACE

[Anthony]

Get an edelbrock pump. Put in a lower thermostat. Never drive slower than 60 mph

[patrickt]

What fan model number are you currently using? Like you, I have the larger radiator but use a SPAL #30102120, which moves 1918 CFM of air, and it is not noisy at all. In fact, sometimes I can't tell whether it's on or off at stop lights just by listening. I also have the Edelbrock water pump. Plus, I have pusher fans, but they are on a separate circuit and only come on manually. They do help to keep the temperatures down if I turn them on, but they also make more noise.

[Whodeeny]

Originally Posted by patrickt

What fan model number are you currently using? Like you, I have the larger radiator but use a SPAL #30102120, which moves 1918 CFM of air, and it is not noisy at all. In fact, sometimes I can't tell whether it's on or off at stop lights just by listening. I also have the Edelbrock water pump. Plus, I have pusher fans, but they are on a separate circuit and only come on manually. They do help to keep the temperatures down if I turn them on, but they also make more noise.

Patrickt -
I have a different fan than you have (SPAL VA18-AP70/LL-86A). Maybe I should try your fan instead. At Summit it goes for $151. I will give ERA a call to ask if it works. Thanks for the info on the fan you have.
BD

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by Whodeeny

Patrickt -
I have a different fan than you have (SPAL VA18-AP70/LL-86A). Maybe I should try your fan instead. At Summit it goes for $151. I will give ERA a call to ask if it works. Thanks for the info on the fan you have.
BD

It should work -- ERA picked it out for me. If you're using their standard braces it will be a breeze to install. Here's a pic. One thing I did notice was that about 14 years ago the connectors that go to that fan, and that are right below the upper radiator hose on the driver side, were not making a good connection at the wiring harness and I was getting an intermittent voltage drop because of the resistance from the crappy connection. You might want to check that.

[patrickt]

Here's another tip: Your fans and headlights take their ground from the front X-Member framing. That connection might be good, bad, or anywhere in between, but it never hurts to improve your grounding. Plus, if you don't have some supplemental grounding straps, the ERA wiring design has the engine ground to frame as one single 10 gauge wire running from the passenger side cylinder head to the firewall. The ground current will find its way through other connections if you don't have at least one nice ground strap from the engine/transmission to the frame. In this picture, you see that I have a 2 Gauge ground strap running from the driver's side cylinder head to the grounding point on the X-member. Since the X-member is tubular, I use an aluminum saddle washer to make a nice clean connection to it (think back to high school geometry and a line touching a circle, it will only do so on one single point). You can't see that connection in this pic, but you get the idea. If you don't have a grounding strap (or two, or three) from your engine/transmission to your frame, that alone will decrease the performance of your fans and headlights. If you're curious as to what I do for grounding, I have the battery's negative cable attached to the passenger side cylinder head. The battery is also grounded directly to the frame. I then have a strap that runs from the transmission to the frame, a strap that runs from the intake manifold to the firewall, and a strap that runs from the driver's cylinder head to the X-member frame, which is where the fans and headlights pick up their ground. Before I did that, with the fans and lights on I had 34 amps running through the single little skinny black 10 gauge ground wire running from the cylinder head to the firewall. Now that wire carries less than three amps. Plus, of the 210 amps that my starter is pulling during normal cranking, 60 of those amps are returning to the battery through the battery's ground to the frame (and not through the negative cable). The increase in cranking performance with the upgraded grounding was actually quite remarkable.