96capricemgr

iTrader: (1)

simple thermodynamics that water is a better heat transfer medium than coolant. If you saw it was no cooler with straight water and was still running warm then that is an indication that there is a problem. Maybe it is the airdam folding back or something else but straight water is the best for staying cool.

GermanLSX

Thanks caprice. I would agree about the stock radiators being like spark plugs if I were driving in the states. I do however run stock AC Delco replacement plugs & wires .050 gapped.

Ive heard of tunercat but one problem; I only run Mac computers [IMac 27 inch, Ipad 2, and Iphone] . -_- thats another thing I need to get fixed. lol if no LT1 PCM tuning software is compatible with apple then my only other option is a mail order tune. I hear macs are capable of running windows software but ill have to call apple on how that works...

GermanLSX

Yeah obviously straight water is best for racing and runs cooler, but if I were to run water I would do a 30coolant/70water mix. Just my preference. I ran only water in my old BMW and I ran it for 3 months next thing you know water pump locked up. Id say it made minimal difference in temperature, about 10 degrees.

Paul Bell

iTrader: (9)

Coolant has some lubricating properties that seals and things in water pumps need. Also, iron blocks will start to develop rust with straight water.

96capricemgr

iTrader: (1)

I wasn't saying we should all run straight water.
I was commenting on the fact that he said he ran straight water shortly and it did not help. We know that antifreeze does not transfer heat as well but it is a compromise made to lower freezing point and provide corrosion protection.

Shownomercy

iTrader: (1)

Distilled water and stock radiator here.

Good luck finding aftermarket fans and not paying a pretty penny for em. The closest I could find were 2,100cfm derale pushers, hoping they do the job stock did

Jon A

Do you mean the transmission cooler is 5 rows? Or the radiator core? Hopefully the former as 5 rows in the radiator core would be a bad sign. With aluminum radiator cores making more, smaller rows only reduces the efficiency of the core for a given total core thickness.

And if you can get your hands on a Hypertech or the like to reprogram the fans, I do think that's a good idea, don't get me wrong. Just don't expect it to help you on the Autobahn. It is a worthwhile thing to do for city driving (or if you ever go to an autocross).

Jon A

And since you've never done the things describe by those suggesting an upgrade is worthwhile with your car, or any car for that matter, your opinion is based upon ZERO experience, facts or data relating to the real world.

96capricemgr

iTrader: (1)

What haven't I done? Are you suggesting I never bought a new radiator, or ran other than a 50/50 mix, or tried a electric waterpump, or played with fan temps, how about I add putting a higher wattage motor on a stock fan.

Anyone who has been around cars any length of time knows about the placebo effect and the effects of replacing worn out components and thinking the new stuff is awesome. We were all there at one point, most of us get past it.

I will say that I believe the b-body a little easier to cool, think the nose is easier to get air through the vertical radiator. In cool weather I actually have to block the tranny cooler and therefore part of the radiator airflow to keep the tranny up to temp, and had no cooling "problems" with more like 12:1 compression an 8yo radiator and an electric waterpump. The only "problem" was that the electric waterpump caused the engine to run 4 degrees warmer at 70-75mph than it did at 35mph and this is 2+hour each way drives to the track, full heat soak. It showed the electric was flowing less than the mechanical but is still adequate.

You have a screw loose if you are going to argue that people have never replaced broken/worn out stuff with new and proclaimed the new a huge upgrade over the old despite the old having been worn out.

GermanLSX

Me I should have clarified before I missed typoed. [Iphones with LS1tech app bad combination] lol

What I meant to say was the trans-cooler is 15 row core but missed to type the 1. Radiator specs are 3 row. 5 row core for a radiator is just too much. I doubt autocross is necessarily essential to run a 5 row core. Not experienced in autocross so I wouldnt know surely. 3 row core is good enough cooling to cool of the Miami Heat.

The hypertech looks like a cool & neat tool. Did some quick research and heard people claim it was a waste and others claimed it was great. I guess some guys who hated it bought them for all the wrong reasons. Ill keep researching on the tuning side and keep calling places. The fans are still tuned to stock specifications which will make due for now.

Reaperchild

Haha ... That's definitely how Bahraini's do it around here .... Pure Water !!
been running the same on my LS1 radiator & so far replaced 2 Broken Radiators & 1 rusted Stock Pump .... along a 160* Stat ....
I think however, the 160 Stat is always open & that's a bad thing, since the water doesn't settle to be cooled down by the fans++ ...

draggin97s10

iTrader: (2)

I run a stock Radiator(new), factory(new) water pump and a 160 stat with manual fans..runs at 174(what tuner pro tells me) degrees in 100 degree weather....if i am moving at all it stays right at 174 without the fans even on....and you're telling me that GM provides just enough to cool it.....

Jon A

No, I was talking about the fan settings being important for autocross. When autocrossing your average speeds are very low so kicking on the fans early is helpful. The runs are short enough overheating is unlikely but it will get pretty warm with the stock fan settings.

Don’t worry about that, it’s a non-issue. It’s sort of an old wives’ tale that slowing down the coolant allows the radiator to cool it more and thus the engine to run cooler, the truth is the opposite—the faster the coolant is circulating the better off you’ll be, unless that causes some other problem (which is where the old wives’ tale came from).

Jon A

You’ve never actually done anything with your car that has tested your cooling system, or radiator specifically, enough to give you any indication how good it is or isn’t; nor have you educated yourself enough on how cooling systems work to have the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Nor do you have the good sense to know what you do not know. I’ll try and dumb it down for you.

Your cooling system is a system. It is a closed loop system. Its purpose is to remove heat. In order to test this system, you need to put heat into it. Lots. You need to do that long enough for the closed loop system to make quite a few “loops” before it will reach a new steady state temperature for the given heat input.

If your temp is being regulated by the thermostat or the fan settings (only at low speed), you are not putting enough heat into the system to test it. You’re testing your thermostat rating and your fan settings. You should have known those already.

In order to test the system, and the radiator specifically, you need to put enough heat into it long enough that the temp rises to the point the thermostat is wide open (happens approximately 30 degrees above its opening, or “rated” temperature) while giving it the airflow appropriate to the application.

Where do you think this heat comes from?

Your engine has a specific thermal efficiency. Yes, it will vary with conditions but not enough to matter for this discussion, since it’s way below 50%. That means only a small amount of the heat energy released by the gasoline makes it to the input shaft in the form of mechanical energy. The rest is lost—some via radiation, some goes out the tailpipe, but a large chunk is put into the cooling system.

That amount of heat will vary proportionally with how much power your engine is putting out—right now!—not what it’s rated for or what it can potentially produce. If you’re “cruising” your 1000 HP engine down the street while eyeballing the hookers on the sidewalk, it may only be taking 20 HP for your car to maintain that speed. Guess how hard that taxes your cooling system. Not very hard.

When you put your foot to the ground and you’re actually using all of your HP, you’re putting a large amount of heat into the cooling system. The more powerful the engine, the more heat you’re putting into the system.

If you do that for only 10 seconds, the heat input to the system was a “spike.” If it takes you 10 minutes to turn around, idle back to the starting line and do it again, while you may call that “hotlapping,” I call it an oxymoron. And so does your cooling system. A blip is easily absorbed without much drama. What matters is the average HP your engine is actually producing over a length of time.

If you hold your foot at least close to the floor for a while, you’re using a larger percentage of your HP and doing it for longer than a “spike.” Most people experience this while towing a load up a long hill/mountain pass in their pickup or SUV. In a car, one way to do it is with speed.

The amount of power required to overcome aerodynamic drag (by far the dominant force at speed) is proportional to the cube of the speed. Yes, the cube. That means simply cruising down the road at 100 MPH takes nearly five times as much power as cruising at 60 MPH. Five times as much heat is being put into the cooling system. You have more airflow which helps, but it doesn’t make up for it. You have less than double the airflow (even with good aero). And doubling the airflow does not double the efficiency of the radiator—it only increases ~1/2 to ~2/3 depending upon many variables. So you’ve quintupled the heat into the system, but only increased its ability via more airflow by less than 50%.

If you know how to work the exponent key on your calculator, you can quickly see how cruising at 130, 150, etc, may cause issues with the cooling system you will never notice in normal highway driving. At 150 you’re putting over 15 times as much heat into the system as you are idling along at 60. And the increased airflow will only make your radiator work about twice as well.

An even worse thing to do, is run on a road with some curves in it. Be it a roadcourse or a pretty mountain highway somewhere in Europe where they’re allowed to drive a bit more spiritedly than we are here. This causes one to constantly accelerate, then brake, then accelerate, then brake. The overall duty cycle of the throttle--the average HP actually being used--can be similar to a high speed run but you no longer have the benefit of all that high speed air helping out your radiator since your average speed is lower.

This is about the toughest test a car’s cooling system will ever see. People who actually have done this with their cars have results and knowledge you do not. Here’s what some results look like:



That’s a graph of speed and water temp vs. time of my car from one of the sessions on track this weekend. My current fan on setting is 185, so that’s where it starts out when the green flag finally comes out.

As you can see, the temp doesn’t cross 200 until a full three minutes into the session. In that time I’ve accelerated WOT from ~35 MPH to ~130+ MPH three times and accelerated from ~35 to ~110 MPH three times. That’s six foot to the floor, ***** to the wall, all out WOT acceleration runs from a near stop well into triple digit speeds. All done in three minutes!

You’ve never done anything remotely that harsh with your car. And if you did, and it stayed under 200 degrees like mine did, surely you’d hold that up as “proof” (as you’re doing so with much less right now) the cooling system is adequate for anything. But as you can see from the chart, at this point the test has only just begun.

It takes a full 10 minutes before the coolant temp levels off, finding its new steady-state value for the conditions in the lower 220’s. By that time I’ve made 20! full throttle acceleration runs. I’ve spent a full 5 minutes with my foot to the floor. This track is harder on the cooling system than many others because you spend a very large % of the time at WOT and your average speed isn’t all that high. A lot of other tracks aren’t this bad.

Now we know how good my cooling system is or isn’t.

Since you haven’t done anything remotely similar to any of the above, you have no idea how good yours is. Worse, is that you’re not smart enough to know what you don’t know. Now that you’ve been educated a little bit, you probably realize how foolish you look when you say those of us who have put our cars through some of the above and have real world experience with various radiators doing it are delusional fools who have been tricked by the placebo effect. It makes you look even more foolish than usual.

bufmatmuslepants

iTrader: (3)

Winner winner chicken dinner!

If you saw no difference in temperature going to straight water from straight coolant, you have some other issues going on.

Only use the amount of antifreeze that your demographic region dictates. Basic chemistry tells us that pure water is the best coolant, period. The specific heat of water is 1.0. This is the common chemistry yardstick that says that it takes 1 BTU to raise 1 pound of water 1° F and is assigned the 1.0 specific heat number. A 50/50 mix of ethylene glycol (the green stuff) has a tested specific heat number of 0.5 and of propylene glycol of 0.3. What this means is that it take twice the amount, in the case of the green stuff (and over three times for the red stuff) of BTUs to raise the same amount of water 1 degree!! This means that pure water will remove double the amount of heat and carry that heat away from the source per unit volume. Now, do the arithmetic and you will find out that the more pure water...the more heat gets taken away! Do not confuse this with the boiling point of the coolant. Pure water will boil at a lower temperature than that of a mix of water and antifreeze, as well as freeze at a higher point. The application of pressure in the system by the system through the normal expansion of water and gas during heating, is the solution to keeping the water from boiling away. A 10 LB pressure on water raises is vapor point to 239° F.

I would get a new OEM radiator, and a new radiator cap, and a new OEM waterpump. Fill it with 25% of the green stuff and 75% distilled water, make sure your air dam is on, and I guarantee you will never see another issue.

96capricemgr

iTrader: (1)

You BLINDLY want to bash me because I asked you for performance numbers to back your dyno numbers.

I understand a lot more than you are willing to believe, including the fact the OP has a nearly stock car making substantially less power than either of ours.

It is foolish to push a complete revamp when the components of a system are old, simple as that.

Far as what I have done with my car, do you have it GPS'd or something?

Jon A

Ah, the ol', "The Math Teacher gave me an 'F' because he doesn't like me!" defense. Did that work very well with your parents? That's OK, the last thing I expected from you was an actual technical argument or any data to back it up.

While there are a number of reasons one might want to be harsh with you, the primary one is that you're talking out of your *** on a subject about which you know nothing, causing you to give bad advice. It happens quite often with you. The gulf between the amount of knowledge you think you have, and the amount you actually do, resembles the Grand Canyon. I don't think there's a tightrope in the world long enough to bridge that gap.

Beyond insulting Newbies who ask dumb questions (to which everybody knows the answer, but nobody else chooses to be as rude as you) in order to make yourself feel better, you seem to struggle. When you're not advising people with tall port aftermarket heads that they should use the stock LT1 intake because you have an emotional attachment to it you're admonishing people who might even think about replacing their 20 year old lifters or timing chain while it's easy because stock is best! That seems to be your answer for nearly every part on the engine for some reason. Discouraging people from adding cubes because they might do it wrong and not make the most of them, discouraging aftermarket head and intakes no matter what a person's budget is or goals are....

I can't think of a single new part for the LT1 engine which has been introduced since the Clinton Administration was interviewing interns that you haven't bashed in one way or another or told people all over the internet how they "don't need" it. Can you name a single part (AI products excluded)? And people wonder why the aftermarket sucks for these cars.

John Lingenfelter was making 420 RWHP with these cars 20 years ago. Time marches on, we're supposed to progress. And yet anybody who wants to do anything different than your preferred cookie cutter 420 RWHP setup on a on a street engine gets bashed by you. This is a disservice to the LT1 community.

Anyway, back to the thread:
Nobody was "pushing" a "complete revamp." The guy has a broken radiator. As somebody who is much harder on the cooling system than most people, he was advised replacing his broken radiator with one that's better is a good idea for his application. Only a fool, would think that advice "foolish." If you had ever actually done anything with your car we're describing you would realize how foolish you're being.

Good thing he didn't ask about brakes.... I'm sure the stock ones work great for you, therefore they should be fine for top speed Autobahn runners and roadracers as well! Seriously, what portion of your radiator argument shouldn't apply exactly the same way to the stock brakes for exactly the same reasons?
I do know in your younger days years ago, when the trees were devoid of leaves and there was a bit of a bite in the air, you'd occasionally feel the urge to go to the track. I'm sure if you had been to a drag strip any time this decade in the summer months and successfully backed up your midwinter timeslips we all would have heard about it by now.

As for me, I was at the track just two days ago. How about you? I made 120 acceleration runs and meticulously logged an extensive amount of "performance data" on each and every one.

Quite a few of the more advanced drag racers (usually not LT1 owners) who actually have brains and want to use them to make their cars go faster have data AQ boxes in their cars as well. I can overlay their data right on top of mine and we can compare the acceleration of the two cars in great detail. For those of us who actually want to understand what's going on, this type of comparison offers a tremendous amount of information. For those who only want to run a single number on the perfect day to wear as a badge of honor on the internet for the next decade, it's a waste. Race days are usually not in perfect weather. Of course I don't consider those people "racers" of any type. Well, "bench" maybe....

bufmatmuslepants

iTrader: (3)

I'm not really trying to defend Dwayne right now, but Jon that was a more angry or personal attack than he has ever made. You take year long hiatus' and come back to "teach a lesson". You've been adamant as he has about not needing bigger cubes citing your hp with your "very expensive heads". We're all on the same team here.

As far as the OPs combo, running sustained 140 mph runs in a stock longblock car should not cause cooling problems in a fully functioning stock cooling system. To upgrade will not hurt anything and helps for future mods, but I agree with Dwayne that a NEW stock radiator, new cap, and new mechanical pump running distilled water with either water wetter or some type of corrosion inhibitor, a functioning air dam, a 160 stat, lowering fan on temps, and tuning them off over 70 will stop the overheating problem for 1/4 of what the new big radiator would cost. If the OP wants to upgrade to a setup he will never outgrow there is nothing wrong with that. It's just like if he asked about brakes, a set of hawk pads on the stock setup would greatly increase stopping power, but yes CTSV brakes and 5th gen rotors would be something he wouldn't grow out of.

Shownomercy

iTrader: (1)

Jon A, you should stick around. I thoroughly enjoy reading your posts.

z_speedfreak

iTrader: (3)

I dont worry about that with a 160tstat... how ever this statement isnt true across the board. I spent nearly a decade working as the mate/engineer on fishing boats and one of my good fishing buddies has master certifications in detroit diesels, cats & cummins, and with those types of engines its a big no-no to run them with no tstat for just that reason, and thats not an old wives tale.
I had one captain with a 12-71 on its last legs and the tstat went so he cheaped out and we thru it back together with out the tstat with me trying to talk him out of it. DD's are troopers tho and it prob had a year left in it. but it made it just 2mos with consistantly higher temps by about 10-20* as the coolant was being recirculated to fast and didnt get to spend enough time in the heat exchanger.