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6 Months In The Making!


Guest James24785

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Guest James24785

Well after buying my Zero in November, stripping it down over winter and making it my own, yesterday I finally drove it.

MOT was booked for 9am and a track day at donnington was booked for 4pm. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end lol!

 

Flew through the MOT without a single issue! Was over the moon with it.

 

Onto the track, and it was a little disappointing. I knew the alignment was all over the place, but I couldn't manage more than 3-4 laps at a time without the water temps getting way too high.

I don't know how accurate the smiths gauges are, but it hit 120 at one point so I came into the pits. Slight hiss from the raceline rail cap, and a bit of coolant had sprayed on the under side of the bonnet.

Left it to cool and did a few more stints and it seemed to be ok, and did the 50 miles home from the track without a problem.

 

Defo too hot for my liking though so time for some research into better cooling

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Ah, not t that unusual with blacktops, some people fit a bypass thin coolant pipe to let air out and circulate coolant. Another method which I did with my retrofits water rail is to drill a few small jolted in the thermostat. Worth noting these engines are designed to run hot for emission targets, if you have fitted the original fan switch but another that will come on earlier.

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I have never seen overheating on a black top in a zero unless the basic rules have not been followed. Some filler caps have problems dealing to the rough cast alloy of some water rails, drilling holes in the state can aid filling and bleeding, but is no use to overcome overheating, the stat temp is important, if the water rails came from GBS it should be right, but have change them from other suppliers. If your system uses cooling fan switch and not ECU I would agree that you need to check operation and position in the cooling system. Getting all the air out of the cooling system is important. There is a written procedure to do this, or air gets trapped in the water rail and top hose, if that is where the fan sensor double problem.

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There are a series of checks to go through to discover which part of the system is causing overheating problems. I personally have no confidence in the 'design' of the raceline water rail. I did buy one ten years ago but couldn't design an effective cooling system around it that would make the operation of the thermostat effective. I never drove with it and sold it on at a loss. Looks nice but remote thermostats are suspect IMO. A quick test to see if the rail/thermostat is the problem is to take the thermostat out and drive like that and see how the running temperatures go.

Can you draw up a schematic showing the pipes, connections, radiator, block of your system. Also roughly measure your radiator matrix dimensions and thickness?

Here's mine. Radiator size not shown but it is four row. I use the standard ford mondeo thermostat. I have a heater but without one the yellow pipes just link rather than go through the heater rad.

post-21-0-07513000-1531559454_thumb.jpg

Edited by Longboarder
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My silvertop zetec was terrible with the raceline rail, temps either too high or to low and took an age to warm up swapped it to retro ford and never had a temp problem sense, I also added a Davis Craig EWP and controller and For good measure a triple core coolex alloy rad. Last week in 30deg on the track the water stayed at 95 no problem.

Edited by DanE
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Guest James24785

My silvertop zetec was terrible with the raceline rail, temps either too high or to low and took an age to warm up swapped it to retro ford and never had a temp problem sense, I also added a Davis Craig EWP and controller and For good measure a triple core coolex alloy rad. Last week in 30deg on the track the water stayed at 95 no problem.

Where abouts you located mate? Be nice to have a nosey at that setup

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