yip

It's been pretty damn hot here in Socal lately and I was having issues with heat soak on my 08 Z06. The car would actually feel slower than it did when it was stock N/A in anything over high 80's weather.

So my friend is attempting to improve the cooling and I wanted to post progress as he does the work.

Spal dual fans with welded on mounting tab's the full length of the radiator. He also cut down the mounting posts on the radiator so we could remove the subframe spacers and bring the subframe back up:





He thinks that mounting the intercooler in front of the crash beam and more vertical right up against the bumper opening will improve air flow through the whole system:










He is also going to move the intake filter into the passenger side of the bumper where the fog light housing was. I'll post pictures of this when he gets further down the road with it.

We will be replacing the condenser and installing a hood with Trackspec hood vents.

Hopefully after this is all done we can get a few laps on the Cali tracks before we heat soak and feel slower than stock N/A.

RPOWU8

Need to replace the paddle fans with the curved blade fans. Spal P/N 30102157.

The curved blade fan pulls 30% more air thru at the higher restriction caused by thicker radiator and intercooler core. Only way to get the curved blade is to buy new fans. The motor and fans will bolt right into the dual shroud you have or you could just swap the blade out buy removing the c clip. Try to reuse the original shroud in front of the AC condensor or make new shrouding to keep hot air from recycling to front of radiator.

Might want to consider oil coolers moved to fog light openings as well.

Interested to here your results.

DJ

c5wolf

Are you replacing the condenser with a different size one?

yip

Thanks for the input on the fans. I will bring it up with my friend. I am going to keep the dewitts with the integrated oil cooler because I really like the quick warm up.

We were just going to install a new OEM condenser. Is there a better direct fit one?

Pmarine1

c5wolf

I thought maybe you had found a smaller Ac condenser that might still work and cover less of the radiator area.

yip

We thought about having one made but we don't think the condeser is an issue.

Unreal

A quick disconnect setup on the condensor for road racing would be sweet. Just pop it out for the weekend. Should be fairly easy to do. I can have the condensor out in <10 minutes. Just refilling it is the pain.

yip

We moved the filter to the passenger side fog light area:









Seems like the intercooler should get better air flow:











Rerouted the DV back into the intake. Going to be nice not having to sound like darth vader coming down the street:





Next thing is ducting the open area around the sides of the intercooler to push air through the condenser and radiator.

chuntington101

Have you thought about getting a smaller AC condenser and mounting behind the other fog light? The Gold R has done this. Also I think the Porsche stuff run small condensers. Just a thought.

If you are struggling with IATs why not get a taller intercooler? There will be the same airflow through the cooler (as the crash bar is in the way) but will have more mass to absorb the heat before the corners. Also a very old school method but you could spray the IC with a fine jet of water. Well proven to help pull heat out the intercooler. Could even have it boost triggered.

On the intercooler, might be worth looking at reducing the size of the end tanks so you can get more core in the same space. If you google F1 intercoolers you will see how they do end tanks to a) maximise airflow across the core and b) get as much core in there they can! I recon you could get an extra couple of inches in the lower end tank alone!

yip

We didn't consider a smaller or relocated condenser because when I'm idle at a stop the A/C gets quite warm. Maybe we didn't think enough about it?

My friend that's doing the work felt that the intercooler that comes with the A&A kit was decent enough to work with. We are trying to keep costs down and not hack too much into the bumper reinforcement.

I'll mention to him about the intercooler sprayer. Funny though because my 2003 Mitsubishi EVO has a factory intercooler sprayer.

BigBlue

I wish high 80's was hot. Been 35 days straight over 100* here haha.

yip

Brutal! I would cry like a little girl. We are spoiled here in Socal.

C6_Racer_X

A few tips. Some are pretty obvious. Some might be rejected as "ugly" even if they are effective. Some might seem counter-intuitive or controversial. All are from over 30 years experience working with boosted and performance modified engines.

• Pipe insulation
  Pipe insulation
  over the radiator hoses and heater hoses keeps the heat in the hose and out of the air under the hood. Even if it gets into the air through the radiator, the heat is spread everywhere instead of heating up the things right next to the hose (like intake air plumbing and boost pipes).
• Pipe insulation
  Pipe insulation
  over the intake air plumbing before the charger will definitely help reduce IAT. You don't need to start with hot air going into the compressor.
• Pipe insulation
  Pipe insulation
  over the boost pipes and hoses after the intercooler might help reduce IAT. Note that you should know your IAT at full boost at around 90% of redline RPM. Log or record a trace of the IAT and ECT numbers and check that before insulating the boosted intake plumbing. If IAT at high RPMs under boost is greater than ECT, leave the insulation off the boosted plumbing. Those hoses and tubes might pick up some heat when off boost or at lower air flow, but at peak flow, your pipes are shedding heat and acting as a bit of an extension to the intercooler.
• A "tune" that isn't fully matched to a low temp thermostat can dramatically raise the temps under the hood and heat soak the intake manifold and the top of the engine. If your tuner say, "Yes, I matched the fan activation temps to the cooler thermostat," I'm somewhere over 95% certain your tune isn't fully matched to the thermostat. The fans are less than half of the adjustment.
  
  The issue with low temp thermostats is the ECT fuel trim map/table, and the catalytic converters. If you don't adjust the ECT fuel trim temperatures down (or move the values down the table if the temps in the table can't be adjusted) by roughly the same number of degrees you reduce the thermostat temperature by, you'll be running rich, trying to "warm up" the coolant with more fuel. That won't happen because of the lower temp thermostat, but the added fuel won't burn completely in the combustion chamber, and you'll have a lot more hydrocarbons going through the catalytic converters. There, the excess fuel will be catalyzed and oxidized (burned), and a lot of heat will be generated in the cats. Because of the tight packaging and the shape of the firewall, that heat usually wafts it's way up and forward at lower speeds or when stopped, and it heats up the top of the engine. This is worse on Corvettes than on a lot of other vehicles, because the space under the hood is really small and really full. I'm not really sure how bad it is at speed on the C6's. It's very bad on the C7's, even at higher speeds because less air flows under the car with the radiator extractor duct.
  
  The test is to run some "normal" (calm, non-competitive, slow) driving while recording the short and long term fuel trims on both banks. Run the test/trace after the thing is up to operating temp. If the ECT maps match the thermostat, the long term and short term fuel trims will be chaotic, random, and will average close to zero. If the ECT maps are set for a higher temperature thermostat (still at the stock setting), the short and/or long term fuel trims will still bounce around, but will stay positive most of the time and can average 5% or more (3% to 7% is typical for a thermostat 15-20 degrees below stock temp, higher, up to 12% or even a bit more is possible if your thermostat is 30 degrees or more below stock temperature). This can also push the mixture so rich that you're losing power on the track or under "competitive driving" situations.
  
  So if your fuel trims are staying positive, go back to your tuner and tell him/her to finish adjusting the tune for the low temperature thermostat by adjusting the ECT map/table. That will cool things off quite a bit under the hood, and your catalytic converters will last a whole lot longer.
  
  Another test is to compare the temps of your catalytic converters with the lower temp thermostat to the temps of the catalytic converters on a similar vehicle with the stock thermostat. Drive together around your slow, calm test drive, and if your cats are significantly hotter than the car with the stock thermostat after some driving at operating temp, you have an issue.

Oh, and the Spal fans, not impressed with those. I've cured more overheating Mercedes and AMG V8's and various overheating "rice rockets" by taking off the Spal fans and putting the stock fans and shrouds back on the radiators.

If you have the DeWitts radiator, check into the matching DeWitts fan setup. Some of them are quite good.

Unreal

Dewitts as the basic spal fans, PWM fans, nuova fans, and all sorts of custom options. Ranging from $350-1200. The cheap ones are not nearly as good as stock.

yip

The Spal fans might not be as good as the OEM fan but the overall setup with the OEM on the dewitt's radiator is not better.

We got some of the ducting and shrouding done. He also came up with a way to support the bumper and grill area. We will eventually build a chassis mount front splitter.

UmX

how are you getting the piping from the front of the blower down to the foglight hole? can u take more pix from the top

yip

Sorry, only have pics from the bottom but you can see that we used the A&A dongle and plumbed it down from there:

UmX

thats nice def some work evolved there.

yip

Thx!

I was in stop and go traffic today in 95 degree weather for over 2 hours and the water temp barely got to the 220 mark but not over. The highest oil temp I saw was 208. I used to feel the ECU pulling power because the car would heat soak if it was 80 degrees + but I haven't felt it pull any power since we completed these modifications.