Push vs Pull

Urban legend has many stories about truckers using the engine heat to cook a meal on long distance hauls. Granted these stories were back in my child hood when cars and trucks were a little less computerized and strictly mechanical. Even then it was something that you listened to with a grain of salt. Yet in your mind you kid of said to yourself "You know its is theoretically  POSSIBLE". It wasn't until my trip to Manitoba for the Grey Owl did I actually believe that it would be a possibility. On  that trip the engine room got so hot that it wouldn't have taken much to slow cook a pot roast in the engine room. A problem that I needed to fix. 
In order to good a good job I needed to optimize the work area, which meant finishing the engine room light install that Harold had initiated in Clear Lake.



Running a switch at shoulder height in that "logical location" was the first order of business. From there Harold had installed the light and left me a simple strip and crimp of the wires.






Once I did this I really kicked myself and said "why the hell did you wait so long to do this?" Seeing is believing and now I can see!!


 The design fail that I created was that the cooling system was pulling air in from outside in through the rad and exhausting into the engine room. The system was designed like that from it's donor vehicle. The difference is that on the donor vehicle, the entire set up was open to the outside not contained in a room with two(relatively) small ventilation windows. Having set up like I did, allowed the engine to remain in acceptable operating temps, but the engine room got hot which meant everything in the engine room got hot! So I decided that we needed to push air through the rad, exhausting to the outside. The way I look at it we need to either change the motor rotation or the motor blade orientation. The motor was not bidirectional, simply swapping the in and out hydraulic hoses won't work. I'm either going to have to rebuild the pump, get a new pump, OR change the fan blade orientation. Keep it simple and do the most conservative (and logical) option first. So it was time to pull the fan.
Now in my type "A" dental way I was able to give my self a clean organized work area.

I set out my plugs and caps so that I could disconnect the hydraulic hoses and not have a river of fluid running all over the place.

The disconnect was easy, the removal was easy too, it made me pause and think OK when is the snag coming?

Thankfully it never did. The fan blades were removed and re positioned with out incident.

A short while later it was all put back together still spinning in the clockwise..... now proof is in the puddin'

Just standing in the doorway, you can feel the air rushing out as demonstrated by my very scientific and technique sensitive air flow measurement equipment.

Now a road test....



 T minus 3....2....1.... here we go.
At the start our temps were close to equal.

After a half hour, we had a temp difference of close to 8 degrees F

After an hour 10.8F difference and it didn't seem to want to move to much, and all the while the engine operating temp. remained in the 180-205 region!


Although this is not a definitive test, it does seem to indicate that the fan blade orientation change is working. Outside temp of 67.2 is about 19C for my Canadian homies, not particularly 'hot'. We'll see what happens under more realistic or 'unpredictable' test conditions. I still plan on putting a cross body air damn just behind the rear wheels. And I may have other design options under my sleeve....