Richor

A friend of mine who happens to be a genius mechanic is currently building an ls motor for his old school truck with a huge turbo etc. Anyways, I was at his shop the other day and he showed me a custom cooling setup he is planning on using that is popular with drag racers. This cooling mod would be great for stock cars running the track consistently or even street driven cars with a decent amount of mods.

The purpose of this post is to guage interest in this particular mod. If there is enough interest what we plan on doing is testing the car in its stock trim after a few track events and then doing his cooling mod and seeing the results.

Here is what he has done in his words :

LS engine, this is my personal engine that will be turbocharged with only 8psi, however I'm running completely stock internals. On a V8 engine, the rear of the engine always runs hotter, therefore allowing parts to fail more easily especially with turbo boost. I'm mearly drilling and tapping the rear of the cylinder heads which are normally capped off. Made a set of cooling lines from the cylinder heads to the bottom of the water pump which is suction. (The heads are pressure). This allows not a large volume, but enough coolant to flow to keep the rear of the engine cool.

Pictures :












http://i104.photobucket.com/albums/m...es11-25630.jpg


From his past experience this mod will definitely work. IF there is enough interest I will install and test on my car and come out with pricing.

Comments appreciated

longdaddy

is this really less money/work than bigger radiator and oil cooler for the cars that have the engine, well, in the car?

drivinfast

along that same line
for 5 degrees it might be worth it to me if: no engine removal, no head removal, you can drill and tap into those areas without getting alum shavings in the system. I assume you are going to make the lines with the ends to sell?

Richor

From what I understand this should be less money than upgrading the radiator etc or be a good supplement to adding a radiator. The radiator does not change the fact the the rear of the ls engines do not receive enough cooling. By the time the coolant reaches the rear of the engine it is already heated.

( I am not as mechanically inclined as my friend but I will be passing all questions on to him and post up answers )


In terms of the engine, head removal , he said the engine does not need to be removed, nor the block. He said there are steps in order to make sure that alum shavings do not enter the engine. Instructions will be provided on how to install.

and yes the kit will include the lines and ends.

His initial plan is to do it on my car then offer it locally and let people post up their results. after which he will make a kit to market accross the US. If we get enough interest this can all be done in a month or so.

Keep the questions coming. He is going to sign up here later tonight to answer questions on his own,.

trackboss

I've already done it the correct way. I tapped my heads, where the factory ports are, to 1/8 NPT. In place I installed an-4 adapters and ran -4 hose from the driver's side front to rear then across to passenger side in the rear and up to the front. There I installed a t fitting (3 total) and continued on to vent into the radiator, where I welded a -4 male fitting in place of the barb, as the factory does. The older C5's were done in a similar way. Reason is to bleed all four high corners of the water jackets and get any air out. The way shown above will not bleed air out well because it goes into a low point (water pump). It will just suck any air back into the system. The only thing that may be better than what I have done is to install a fitting in the surge tank and vent it there instead of the top of the radiator where it goes to the surge tank indirectly. Kind of hard to do the plastic tank, but I plan on making an aluminum one where I can add fittings as necessary. The hard line setup is slick, but too rigid so it makes it more difficult to move things around when doing work where as the soft lines I used can be just pushed out of the way instead of removed.

Pumba

The idea of opening the rear vents on the cylinder heads is the correct thing to do. As others have written, it will let air bubbles escape that become trapped.

In 1997 and I believe early 1998 C5s GM had a tube set that connected the rear vents to the front vents and from there they moved the air bubbles into the radiator. This tube set was dropped for cost reasons.

One thing that all LS engines with the stock water pump suffer from is insufficient coolant flow the the rear cylinders. This can only be overcome by replacing the stock water pump with the Evans Cooling replace water pump. Most LS engine owners are not aware of this problem, and if they were they probably not spend the money for the Evans pump.

0Randy@DRM

There isn't enough room under the C5Z intake. They used these on some of the cars up to 2002ish???

Randy

Pumba

You are correct Randy.

The solution is to run a rubber hose from the two rear vents around the intake manifold along the cylinder head up to join the front two vents.

trackboss

Room can be made Randy. I have a '99 and when I installed a late model intake manifold I simply removed a few ribs under the manifold where the tubes are and just pushed the tubes around to clear. It can be done. If I get a chance this weekend I'll take a photo of my AN setup that I mentioned above. It's really nothing new. I've done it on my old small block ford motor by tapping the intake manifold. Reason I went to it on my corvette is because I didn't want to ever have to worry about a leaking factory tube or gasket. AN stuff I can find just about anywhere and in a pinch I can simply plug the holes with a 1/8 pipe plug.

mgarfias

You don't even have to tap the heads. I picked up some aluminum blocks that bolt in place of the factory steam vents (or their block offs), and then ran hose from the back to the front, and then over to the radiator.

mgarfias

Oh, and its not going to cool the car any more, but does keep steam pockets from forming around the rear chambers, which is always a good thing.

0Randy@DRM

Or you can jack up the side of the intake with a knock sensor harness. Local kids thought it would be a good idea to install a head and cam package by themselves

BrianCunningham

GM did that on the reverse cooled LT1/4's