ENTERTAINMENT VALUE, PART TWO (the hot rodder’s saga)

Got the wheels balanced, back on the road and the shimmy is gone. Just a thrown wheel weight and air in my power assisted rack and pinion steering. Turns out, that turning the wheel without the motor running causes air to enter the power steering system, oops.

Back on the road and having fun! The other radiator fan is making noise? Off with the grill and sure enough the second fan is rubbing internally. Contact the supplier and they agree to exchange both fans, so I order two new fans. This time I upgrade to all metal fan with ball bearings (no more plastic), more cost but I’m tired of playing with fans.

New fans arrive, they require additional mounting fabrication along with a few other modifications to fit them in place. While I have it apart I decided to rework the fan relays, piggybacking two relays per fan motor wired in parallel doubling the current capacity, plus in the event one relay fails I’ll still have another (I may be a little paranoid). Along with resettable circuit breakers to replace the fuses, I should be done with all the trouble. Also, to make things easier next time I decided to replace the grill nuts & bolts with blind clips and body bolts to make removing/installing the grill a little faster (not like I’m doing that much).

OK, everything is buttoned back up and ready to test. THE FANS ARE NOT COOLING THE MOTOR!? And, it is a cool day! I'm really bummed!

I send an e-mail to their tech support, I explain that their fans are rated at 3300cfm each, a 1000cfm greater output per fan than the ones I removed, yet they do not cool my motor? We go through the installation, the wiring, everything is correct. Tech support is at a loss, saying their fans really do have more output and draw less current than the ones I'm replacing, so there is no reason why they would not cool my motor? Racking my brain, I’m seriously thinking about sending these back, exchanging them for the ones I took out. After all the old ones did cool the motor. Yeah, they were troublesome, yeah they pulled extremely high current requiring wiring upgrades and a high output alternator to keep up with them, yeah they blew fuses, and yeah they burned up in less than 6 months. But, they did cool the motor when they worked (when being the definitive).

As a last ditch effort, I decided to reset my digital fan controller to a lower temperature setting just to see if that will help. Oops, seems when I disconnected the battery it wiped out the program memory, the controller wasn’t controlling the fans correctly. Reset the controller and Wow, these new fans really work well! This is the coolest the motor has ever run! May have to increase the temp settings a little.

Isn’t it great to finish a project with everything working and………..aaah, the motor has a miss in it?!!!!!