48 chevy pickup with SBC engine gets real hot under hood , looking for a good way to rid the engine bay of hot air to hopefully help engine stay a bit cooler and cooler air to engine. A couple small louvered hood vents, some kind of ram air thru the grill area , ram air thru inner fender wells? Anyone have any suggestions ? Thanks Dave
She runs at approx 185 while on highway but jumps to 200 210 sitting in traffic . I think it would run a bit cooler if the heat could excape from under the hood
It's the nature of the beast. Internal combustion engines produce horsepower by producing heat: fuel, spark, BOOM=heat. So we take cars that were designed and built with 95 hp engines, and stuff in a 300 hp heat-builder. The best way to cope with under-hood heat (and I cope with it in my '51 AD pickup) is air movement, in and out. Don't restrict inlet or block outward flow (you've already restricted outward flow by having a wider, bulkier engine). I've contemplated louvered inner fender panels (with the louvers being oriented to be air scoops on the engine side) but my rig doesn't get to fry-an-egg-on-the-hood temps, so doesn't warrant a tear down to do that. I think the best solution would be a louvered hood, with a few louvers on the SIDE of the hood, towards the rear. Since I live in the Pacific NorthWET and drive my truck year-round, a louvered hood top doesn't make sense to me. Not knowing where you live, this may not be a problem for you. But I really don't want to pull the hood, repaint, and worse: realign it. What have you got for a radiator/fan combination? What temp does your engine reach? This is where to start controlling heat. After I built a shroud (with an electric fan) and started controlling engine heat my under-hood temps dropped (the fan was able to pull more heat out of the system, and direct air flow across the engine to the firewall and down. It work OK for me. YMMV.
I've had several AD trucks with SBC's and put shrouds on all of them. Don't recall ever having a heat problem. Adding a shroud and/or electric fan for backup might be what you need.
3 core alum radiator 3000 cfm elec puller fan with narrow alum shroud its never reached 215 , should I not worry about it?
Ah, details! I never had a condenser or trans, cooler to deal with. Your going to have to figure a way to get more air through all that. Moving the trans. cooler would be a good place to start. Maybe adding more space between the components in front of the radiator would help with getting more air to flow through the radiator.