Willing to make cooling system components?

[Gimpster]

Hi RacerX

Given your willingness to bring to market intake manifolds, turbo manifolds and intakes.... how about some quality cooling system components? It would nice to see some products that:

1.) replace the weak cooling neck on the drivers side of the cylinder head
2.) Thermostat housing that can bolt to the water pump, but utilize a normal thermostat especially since the first tuning mod people do is turn them down to 195* anyway. I don't get the point of having a $50+ thermostat on this car.
3.) I believe you are looking at this as part of your turbo manifold thread, but a cooling fan setup that won't fail regularly would be nice.

I'm sure people would have other ideas too, but would be really nice to see some supporting/longevity mods on this car. GM really did us wrong with the quality of the components they used on the 1.4T cars.

 

[jeff@racerxfab]

Hi RacerX

Given your willingness to bring to market intake manifolds, turbo manifolds and intakes.... how about some quality cooling system components? It would nice to see some products that:

1.) replace the weak cooling neck on the drivers side of the cylinder head
2.) Thermostat housing that can bolt to the water pump, but utilize a normal thermostat especially since the first tuning mod people do is turn them down to 195* anyway. I don't get the point of having a $50+ thermostat on this car.
3.) I believe you are looking at this as part of your turbo manifold thread, but a cooling fan setup that won't fail regularly would be nice.

I'm sure people would have other ideas too, but would be really nice to see some supporting/longevity mods on this car. GM really did us wrong with the quality of the components they used on the 1.4T cars.

I'm sure we can. I did notice quite a few threads on the water neck failure in the 1.4L forum. We would need to modify the design to make it manufacturing friendly with our current capabilities. I will have the OEM components ordered and we can get them into CAD and go from there.

We always like suggestions, obviously the community knows far better what components are needed.

Is there a specific thermostat you would like us to use?

 

[Gimpster]

First of all, thank you for the response

Yah, the cooling systems are proving to be the achilles heel of these cars in the mid and long-term ownership. I'm not alone in having to, essentially, have to replace every cooling system component on my car... at ~63k. The rest of the car, comparing it to Delta 1 chassis cars I owned prior, is quite good IMO. The cooling system issues give me a lot of pause on modifying the car much further than I already have TBH.

Personally, I'm fine with just running an off the shelf Stant Superstat which has a GM equivalent PN. Anything that isn't electronic, prone to failure and costs 50+ dollars would be a win. Whatever diameter is appropriate for the housing dimensions we are working with. I didn't measure mine when I had the car apart, but maybe you have a core/mockup engine in the shop you could use. The only gotcha I can see on the thermostat would be finding a molded hose setup to replace the overly complex clip on style hoses, but I suppose thats pretty minor.

As for the coolant neck, whatever we can do to simplify it. I'm thinking like on the surge tank return a guy could just use an off-the-shelf NPT barb vs. the clipped in. I guess in general you could CnC a housing and then just use ORB fittings on it to keep complexity of the model down? I am not an engineer, I only do amateur modeling stuff for my 3d printing projects

There is also a coolant temp sensor in the plastic neck we'd need to find a threaded equivalent for too. I have all the service manuals and can see if they list temp vs. resistance testing to find one. For all I know, its the same as every other GM coolant temp sensor and we could just use that.

 

[mja]

A plug for people wanting to run a separate temp sender/gauge inside the car would be nice too.

 

[Blue Moon Sonic]

I do have a spare water outlet that can be sent out if you guys need one. I replaced mine preemptively during my transmission swap, before a failure could occur. Still fully intact with no cracks in it, but it is aged a good amount after 70k.