Small Diameter Water Pump Pulley from ACE
 

Acton Custom Enterprises sells a small diameter water pump pulley for FEs that will spin the water pump faster. Has anybody installed this on their FE? The reason I am asking is that I thought this might cause the radiator cooling fan on my car to run less. I have a ERA with a 427 big block engine and the heavy duty cooling system. I do not have the small fans that are typically mounted in front of the radiator. I have street car with the grill splitter installed so those small fans wouldn't fit. The cooling system on the car actually works quite well. My only complaint is that the cooling fan is noisy when it runs and I thought this might cause it run less. Any comments or recommendations? Thanks.

Here is a link the pulley -
https://actoncobra.com/index.php?mai...lley&x=15&y=10

BD

It'll be cheaper to get ear plugs.;)

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

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.

The seal went out on my Edelbrock water pump in a little over 2000 miles. I replaced it with a Tuff Stuff unit.

I doubt it would do enough to alleviate your complaints about electric cooling fan noise. Even if it spins the water pump a little faster, the extra rpm at idle or low rpm speeds would not be that significant. I have the HD electric fan on my ERA and it's pretty noisy too - but effective.

Increasing the flow rate of the coolant may not help in reducing the temperature of the coolant. Too slow of a flow rate will allow too much heat to be transferred and too fast a flow rate will not allow enough time for the metal to transfer heat to the coolant.

Think of it this way-------if you have a bed of hot charcoal and you walk across, you'll get burned. However, if you run across it can be done without getting burned. It's all a function of heat transfer.

In a nutshell, I wouldn't change the pulley until the system was professionally evaluated to ensure optimization.

No offense to anyone but this is not how thermodynamics and heat transfer works. Unless the pump cavitates, which is unlikely, more flow rate will always help accelerate heat transfer (from the engine to the water and from the water to the radiator and in turn to the air).

Exactly !

I always thought when I hear people say that that it was wrong.

This all seems like a round about way to cure a noise problem.

Wouldn't a quieter fan or sound deadener be much cheaper and more effective?

John

My apologies on my previous post. I did a poor job of trying to explain myself. Suffice it to say you must always consider fluid velocity in your temperature control system design.

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.

http://38.134.118.239/fan001.jpg

Another Tip
 

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.:cool:


http://38.134.118.239/groundstrap001.jpg

The biggest factor for any puller fan is to make sure that it has a shroud