sunbeamtiger.co.uk

Since summer seems to have arrived early in the UK, I thought it might be opportune to remind Club members about the old Tigers East/Alpines East cooling article:

http://www.teae.org/cooling/cooling_article.html

The somewhat surprising conclusion was that “airflow is the cure”.

Recommendations are:

Block horn holes.
Block gap between crossmember and bottom of radiator.
Remove brace in front of lower part of radiator.
Fit a custom air dam directly in front of crossmember and 2 inches below.
Use stock fan shroud.
Enclose and seal fan shroud (metal on bottom of shroud completely encompasses fan blades).

Steve Laifman kindly provided detailed information on how to implement the above recommendations.

http://www.tigersunited.com/techtips/St ... lance2.asp

This thread is quiet, everyone's Tigers must be running cool.

Blocked my horn holes last weekend (good tip that!) sure that'll make a difference for this summer

Heard that tip many times but hard to believe it cures all the Tiger cooling shortcomings. Pls. keep us posted about your summer experience...

Just to add that radiator efficiency is decided by surface area, core thickness and fin density.

The more surface area of the Tiger radiator that can be exposed to airflow the better.
This must be combined with making sure that the air actually passes through the radiator rather than avoiding it by going through horn holes etc.

One radiator myth is that the more rows/tubes in a given core thickness the better.
For a given core thickness it is actually more efficient to have a smaller number of rows (e.g. 3 as opposed to 4 or 5).

Airflow is the key (as well as a good condition cooling system)

The horn block offs work in 2 ways:

1. When the car idles they stop the hot air from the engine bay going back through the horn holes and being drawn back through the radiator.

2. When the car is on the run they ensure that all the air is forced through the grill opening into the radiator.

Other things that can help cooling are fully enclosing the fan shroud giving more suction to pull air through the raditor (and a fan with more blades at a more aggresive angle)

Other things that are not about the cooling sytem but can help are things like ceramic coating the headers to keep the temps down in the engine bay, vents to help hot air esacpe the engine bay (LAT style bonnets or lifting the rear of the bonnet edge at the scuttle)

But as always.. rule number one is make sure the system you have is up to spec... its easy to throw a thermo fan on the cars or add other parts.. but are you bandaiding a problem instead of getting to the cause of it?