Mini Radiator Problems!

[Longboarder]

Desperate measures but take out the thermostat as they do cause some restriction to the water flow. Second, take off the electric fan and its cowling as this can cause air flow restriction and refit the old viscous one.

I can't get mine to run cool with an electric fan but its fine on an old cortina fan. I eventualy had my standard cortina 5 rad triple cored (cost £120) and its not cowled.

Do you have a heater or bypass hose fitted from head to pump? You should have one or the other.

 

Nigel

 

PS are you definitely absolutely positively sure the fan is wired right. I know I asked that before.

[Guest Ant]

Going back to the post at the top of this thread, why would you expect the radiator off a mini to provide enough cooling for a "highly tuned engine"? Mini's were 1275 engines at most, in a car of similar weight to a 2B. The bigger the engine and the more fuel consumed then the more heat ends up in the coolant, and so you need a bigger radietor.

 

Maybe it's just me ... but ...

 

Ant

[Guest Battery Bill]

Ant

why would you expect the radiator off a mini to provide enough cooling

Big Kev (Spannerman) has a mini radiator, seems to work OK for him and he went to sunny Le Mans this year Don't know what state of tune his is though

[Guest salty_monk]

There obviously isn't enough cooling capacity at speed as it works fine at rest, to my mind this could mean:

 

1. Rads not big enough - Should be as plenty of people use Coolman or even the old single core rads.

 

2. Fan's obstructing airflow when on the move or is blowing the wrong way.

 

3. All the air coming through the nose cone is not reaching the rad.

 

I had a fan that was a "puller" mounted backwards in front of the rad, although the wires were reversed too the curve on the blades meant it was rubbish. Have now turned it around so that it "pulls" air in as designed & pushes it out the back onto the rad. Not ideal but works ok, (sat in traffic through London for 2 hours yesterday with no probs) will change for a pusher some time soon.

 

My engine runs hotter when I am booting it & doesn't really cool down till I switch off or until I run easy for a considerable length of time.

I have had to build a cowling (pretty much sealed) to the radiator in order to force all the air through the rad, this seems to work quite well, I have croc bonnet so not that easy, (trying to get a seal to the nosecone & still being able to lower the bonnet) will try to put a pic on later in the week.

 

I will also probably move to the low temp stat at some stage & will fit the oil cooler that I have ready when I shorten the sump.

[Guest captn Pugwash]

Take the stat out, check for airlocks, check that all sides of the rad are even temperature, check that the hosed are not kinked or as mine was on my westfield engine, delaminated on the top hode inside the hose, it wasnt stopping the water but needed changing.

 

I took the stat out of the car and mine now runs at 80mph at 65 degrees, when I boot it or get into traffic it may rise to 80 degrees.

 

I had a problem where mine was boiling, 130 degrees on the clock, when we took the top hose off, we added 3 pints of water, we had filled it up but had an airlock, it only showed itself one night on the way to big jims when I gave it some stick, the air must have been in the heater pipes, I run a pinto with a header tank.

 

The way I fill it now is to jack the back end un so the header bottle on the scuttle is higher than the rad top, all the air goes to the header tank then.

 

Try new stat, cooler running one, big jm has the pictures and details, stat is a quintin hazel one, fits a nissan 1600, forget the model or the model number, qth 307??

 

Dave

[Peter Bell]

Boggie, if you are sure there are no air locks in the system, do you have any vents in your bonnet? Try lifting up the back edge of the bonnet somehow and run the car again to see if it improves things. I beleive a problem is getting the hot air back out of the engine bay especially in the earlier cars with the engine bay floor panels.

Peter

[Guest Daz]

Hello all,

 

I seem to have started all this mini radiator shenanigans when I fitted a 4-core into the nose of my 2b a couple of years ago. I was never happy with the fitting of the cortina radiator at an angle between the cross members of the wishbone suspension and I was always having cooling problems with it.

 

Let me assure you that when the mini radiator is in and fitted properly to the 2b it provides far more cooling than the cortina rad ever will. I found that after fitting it that my temp gauge very rarely even came close to 3/4 deflection, and although mine was never a monster tuned car it was a 2.0 Pinto with a DGAS 38 and a Fast Road Cam, so it could shift. I removed the viscous fan and had a cheap and cheerful fan in front of the radiator pushing air through the fully cowled radiator, and I had no extra cooling vents in the engine bay. I reckon that the set up is so efficient that it would still work with a bog-standard mini radiator rather than a 4-core.

 

If I were you I would check the hoses first. I know that the hoses can take a bit of a tortuous route to get to the right holes and it is worth checking to see that none of them have kinked and are restricting the flow. The top hose is fairly straight forward to route, but I ended up taking my bottom hose under the bottom of the engine to the nearside before taking it forward and over the steering rack.

 

If the hoses are all ok I would focus on making sure that there is no airlocks in the system. Also, not wanting to teach anyone to suck eggs, but check regularly that there is enough coolant in the system. I seem to recall that filling the system fully was a complete nightmare, so I always measured how much coolant I put in and compared the figure with the Haynes Manual. I was never content until I got within at least a half pint of the recommended amount.

 

Daz