with summer here I decided to fire up the 32 , in the garage very hot was sweating bullets when I felt my coil it was quite hot mounted on the back of the intake. that's a no gudda. so I came up with a plan to cool it down about 10 degrees or so. did not want to drill any more holes in the fire wall so this is what I made.
Great idea. Now that you have lifted the skirt showing some firewall "leg", any other pics of your '32?
These pictures came up on Facebook yesterday, an oil filled coil overheated due to the ignition being forgotten on - when the ignition is on and engine stopped in a position where the points are closed current runs through the coil all the time. Not on a car, but the problem exists on all points/battery ignitions. Mounting a coil directly to an engine or insulating it would be less good choices when there are much cooler places to put it in available. Electronic ignitions are way more sensitive, if you have those and want them to survive, keep the electronics as cool as possible - but those usually don't cook the coil if left on, they have built in protection.
Finned aluminum should disapate heat in theory, in real life who knows. Sent from my LG-TP450 using The H.A.M.B. mobile app
I drag raced for about 30 years. We always put the coli inside the car on the firewall. Might not look that great, but keeps it cooler. Sent from my SGP561 using Tapatalk
Correct information. Aluminum is a pretty good dissipator of heat. Although there should be actual direct contact between the coil and the alum. cover, no air gap. Mike
Indeed, with an air gap the air insulates and it may become hotter than w/o the cover. Even when there is direct contact there is quite a bit of air gap between the surfaces as they are not perfectly flat. In electronics a thermal paste is used between components that become hot and the cooling fins that cool them to help heat transfer, it makes a big difference and quite a few expensive thermal pastes has been developed for use in computers (where lower temperatures may allow better performance under some conditions). But in normal situations just about anything works better than air, there has been tests (in computers) where everyday substances were tested against the most expensive thermal pastes and the difference was just a couple of degrees. In the garage I'd simply grab some grease, preferably a kind w/o solid particles (such as MoS2 or graphite).
Been millions and millions of cars manufactured with coils mounted on the intake. The OEM never had that concern apparently. Ford, GM MoPar.....no concerns. Ford put coils on intakes of Y-blocks right up to 460's with no concern. GM stuffed them clear back against the firewall where they got no air at all and they seemed to live for many years there. We always put the coils on our circle track cars on the front of the drivers cockpit. Only because we didn't have to move it or mess with it during engine changes. We lost coils with those cars several times and that is a cool place and they were free of most vibration where mounted. I mount mine to my engine so the coil wire is short and the installation looks clean. No problems on my last several cars. Sometimes we tend to overreact and overengineer something where a problem doesn't really exist. I can see isolating things like MSD boxes or other "electronics" but the coil has been mounted on the engine for a long time. Food for thought, SPark
Here's my home made idea. Keeps the coil off the head and fan blade blows air on it. When sitting at idle (hood raised) in the garage for 30 minutes with an ambient temp of 85 degrees, temp. of coil goes to 180 degrees when measured with an digital gun. I am assuming it's cooler when on the road with fresh air blowing in.