started putting things together on the 27 roadster, wanting to stay traditional as possible pre-57 got a 1957 283 small block no side mounts. mounted the radiator and the way the motor has to go in with the oilpan 1/2 inch below the frame, frame only sets 4 inches from ground the water pump is about 3/4 the way up in the radiator. don't want grille shell heighter then the cowl looked at alot of pics and it looks like everyone is running a electric fan. looks like I will only have about 5 inches from the top hose. don't want to use electric but I would to drive the car if you can't keep one cool you ain't going to ride just wanting to know what some of you all did thanks
The fan on the 322 nailhead in my 1917 Touring was mounted on the crankshaft pulley. It was built in 1953; no electric fans were available back then, so perhaps this is a traditional way of solving this problem.
Can you have a 90 degree fill neck welded to in the center of your radiator and plug the top one off and raise your radiator up inside of your grille shell, its better to have your fan at the upper portion of it because thats where the hot water is concentrated. After looking again you can't go much higher.
grille shell is not mounted yet just sitting there,radiator is where it needs to be, good idea on the crank will see if I can come up with something thanks
There is an aftermarket "water manifold" that solves this problem. It bolts on like a stock Chevy V8 water pump but uses a '63 up 6 cyl chevy water pump that ends up mounted higher than the the original. Presto......chango!!!!! Look in some of the street rod on-line catalogs, Speedway, Yogi's, maybe Summit etc.......they're out there
he's too high already...he needs to find a radiator that fits up higher in the shell a zips pump riser would have his fan above the tank or his engine might need to come down and the radiator fit better
Hope you're running bell housing mounts with that '57 SBC, like '55-57 chevy's did. Just a tail shaft mount is bound to break stuff. Why what if it? Put a fan on it that clears the top hose and see how it works. BE sure you have enough timing advance at idle so it won't overheat. You get that the way '57 chevy's did, with manifold vacuum to the vacuum advance.
I once put a SBC and cast iron PowerGlide into a 2 WD 48 Willys Jeep station wagon. I used the old style saddle mounts at the front of the engine, and a conventional tranny mount at the rear of the tailshaft. Over 100K of every type of hard driving and nothing ever broke. A stiff bellhousing properly located by dowel pins and bolted all around is plenty stiff IMHO.
So, you want to make him think he's going to be as lucky as you with whatever kind of trans he runs, Aluminum case automatic housings, Aluminum case manual transmissions, or whatever? Didn't think so.
That's the price he's paying for having the frame 4 inches off the ground. Get a road-race pan and put the engine down where it needs to be. I don't think you're supposed to have a straight-on view of freeze plugs. -Brad
It's not luck. There is nothing to indicate that moving the front motor mounts a few inches forward (from side mount to front mount) causes the engine/tranny to flex - no more than hanging the weight of the tranny off of bellhousing mounts.
Lots of difference, side mounts puts some of the wieght of the motor ahead of the mounts, like a counter balance.This reduces the stress on the trans mount a bunch. Front and rear mounts put all the wieght of the motor and trans against the bell housing. Not saying it will fail, just beyond my comfort zone. Also most transmissions are much lighter than the motor so hangin it by a bell mount is no big deal.
We can agree to disagree on this one. Sometimes people tap the brakes when cornering without slowing the car down at all. They do it for their heads, not because their car was cornering at 100%. Nothing wrong with your opinion on how you prefer to do it. I am not, however, aware of any factual information that shows an untoward amount of flex arising from either of the two engine mounting arrangements we have been discussing; furthermore my own observations over the years have never resulted in any indication of a problem.
I don't really understand why you can't fabricate mounts for the front of the engine that allow it to "drop" to the height that you wish. It is easy to bend and weld metal and way cheaper than going all out modifying your already finished engine. The part about a crankshaft fan is cool, though. Just think, if you had two fans, both small enough to clear the other. What a gas that would be. Good Luck.
Mine have. I have built many drag cars that are plate mounted in the front and middle and have no support or mount on the trans. Granted these werent super high horsepower cars, but they were still over 600 horses and on a transbrake. With a front plate and rear mount only they tend to snap the bell housings, with a front mid and solid rear mount they will snap the tailshaft housing. Just saying, the factories mounted those things in a certain way for a reason.
Your fan to radiator clearance should be about 3/4-1" for optimum cooling. Your level should be sitting on the carb flange of the intake manifold for correct leveling front to back.
You guys are both missing the point of bell housing mounts on the earlier chevs with the forward mounts. The front mounts are low and fairly close together and the rear mount, if there is one, is very low and in the center. The side mounts on the bellhousing were there more to resist the torque of the engine/trans on acceleration from a stop than to support the engine/trans junction. When they went to the side mounts on the block, they were higher above the crank centerline, and significantly farther apart, so resisted torquing of the engine much better. There is some validity to concern for eng/trans "sag" if the mounts are at extreme ends, or spaced quite a distance apart, front to rear, especially with trans cases that are not full circle at the bell housing. Typical of GM automatics, whereas Ford & Mopar have full circle bells in most instance I can think of. Ray
With high HP and a trans brake, a lot of things are getting stressed so I suppose that any weak link in the chain would be a problem. I will defer to the drag racers in terms of best practice for a high powered race car. For a street car, my experience running them this way has not shown any indication of a problem.
Interesting. My 49 Plymouth has one motor mount front and center, up high under the water pump. Two bellhousing mounts wide and low. No full circle at all between bellhousing and block, in fact a relatively tiny footprint for a few bolts. Bellhousing is thick cast iron. But you do end up with a nice triangle. The universal front motor mounts I believe we are discussing mount low and wide. THe rear tranny mount is low and centered. We don't know all of the reasons the factory switched from front to side motor mounts but I would bet a dollar to a donut that it had little or nothing to due with powertrain sag front to rear. About that time we started to see more power accesories and more complex packaging under the hood. It probably had more to do with freeing up space, permitting more design freedom at the front of the chassis, and, of course, lower cost - perhaps because of a reduced parts count.
It was my impression the front mounts under discussion were the two "pegs" used on Chevy V8's '55 tru '57 pass model, which had rather substantial mounts at the bellhousing and, for manual trans at least, NO mount under the tranny. It just hung out in the breeze. What I was rally thinking about, or, more correctly, describing was the much earlier chevy 6 arrangement. That had a couple of small mounts, very close together, just under the timing cover below the front crank pulley. The rear mount was at the rear of tranny. Very tall engine, flywheel/bellhousing/tranny....poised on mounts at the 'bottom' and not very stable. So, they (GM) employed small 'stabilizer' mounts at the outboard points on the bellhousing to the frame to control engine roll when it was torquing on acceleration. '52/'54 used side mounts on the engine. I am quite familiar with the Mopar setup you describe and it is quite a stable 'tri-pod' mounting arrangement. Your comments on freeing up space at the front of the engine is a very good point. Ray
how did this get so o/t I'm going to run front mounts which I'm making and I will run some kind on side mounts off the back of the motor since I'm running side exhaust it looks like a lot of the cars in the old days the grille shell was higher then the cowl don't want that thanks for the inputs
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