So, my engine has been at the machine shop for a couple months, and I've decided to completely redo the cooling stack on this car. On the 8 valve setup, I used a Northern Radiator that never really seemed to keep up. The car got really hot a few times, which may have contributed to the cracked block. So now I have a bigger
Griffin radiator. I'm hoping it helps. I had to do all sorts of hackery to get it to fit. The lower core support that I made last year was low enough to fit the Griffin radiator, but I had to cut more width out of the front of the frame rails. Like this:
Then I had to make new vertical supports that bolt to the frame rails and run up to the stock upper radiator support, which has now been cut up quite a bit. Here's the new radiator in place:
Moving the radiator forward and down frees up space for a proper fan and shroud. I designed some parts in Illustrator and had Send Cut Send cut them out. I'm really pleased with their work and the whole ordering process, but now I know more about putting holes so close to bends. I was
this close to having to scrap the whole thing, but some persuasion with the dead blow salvaged it.
I welded it up, and welded some attachment points with rivnuts onto the radiator, and it seems like it'll work. The square holes are for rubber flaps that I'll rivet in later.
The inlet is 1.5" and the outlet is an angled 1.75", so I'll need to sort that out, but for the most part, the radiator upgrade is done.
With that in, I decided to rearrange my eBay intercooler and stock 240 (I think?) oil cooler. I welded 90 degree bends onto the intercooler inlet/outlet, and -10 fittings to the oil cooler. I had planned on mounting them like this:
But then I realized I was hiding an already inefficient 21x7x2.5" intercooler behind the front body panel, so I started to think about better intercooler options. Packaging and cost led me to this 20x7.8x3.5" Mishimoto core, rated for 575 hp (whatever that means). I'll be mounting it in the grill opening, and moving the oil cooler down behind the body panel, probably with some more speed holes, or other ducting. But I feel good about an intercooler that's properly sized for my turbo.
That brings me to end tank design. I have some room to play with, but I keep coming up with a simple design like this:
The offset inlet and outlet would be slightly easier for packaging the charge tubing, but mostly it seems like not putting them directly across from each other would help use more of the core. Maybe pressurized air meeting the relatively restrictive core would disperse across all the rows, but it makes sense to me that the rows furthest from the in/out would see less flow.
Speaking of that, does anyone know if adding baffles to direct some air to the further rows is actually helpful? I've seen some baffled cast end tanks, but I assume some actual CFD analysis goes into that. I'd like to try bending up some simple .125 aluminum baffles, but I'm no scientist and I may end up hurting flow more than anything. Thoughts?