"Berang" (berang)
10/20/2016 at 18:55 • Filed to: saab stuff
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"Berang" (berang)
10/20/2016 at 18:55 • Filed to: saab stuff | 1
| 7 |
Currently unoccupied. Stopped under to let the car cool off after overheating in gridlocked traffic.
This guy (in a pickup truck - shocking!) had what looked like a single car accident, the police decided to close all lanes of traffic so I got stuck idling for ten or so minutes in 95 degree heat, waiting to get to the off ramp. The car vapor locked while getting off the ramp and I luckily had enough momentum to roll into a side street and park.
After cooling down a little I started heading up city streets, but again traffic stalled. Rather than risk cutting out again and really stopping traffic I parked a little while (under that awesome building) to let the engine really cool off before getting back into traffic. Figures the one day I need to drive cross town was also the hottest day of the week and also the day Truckman McAss Fingers had to crash himself on the highway.
Urambo Tauro
> Berang
10/20/2016 at 19:02 |
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I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while, and this seems like a good opportunity- Is overheating just a thing that happens to classic cars in unfavorable conditions? Do they not have sufficient methods for idle cooling?
(Full disclosure: the oldest car I’ve owned was an ’84 model and the only times I’ve experienced overheating was due to an actual failure somewhere in the cooling system.)
bob and john
> Urambo Tauro
10/20/2016 at 19:03 |
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some classics were aircooled, remember that.
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Urambo Tauro
> bob and john
10/20/2016 at 19:05 |
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Does that matter? If an idling car’s problem is insufficient airflow, isn’t it just a matter of having a fan (and shrouding), whether that fan is cooling a radiator or the engine itself?
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Berang
> Urambo Tauro
10/20/2016 at 19:08 |
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A lot of old cars don’t like to idle for more than a few minutes once warmed up, for a number of reasons. Cooling systems before the 70s tended to be poorly designed. Radiators were too small, older systems didn’t have expansion tanks, belt driven fans had to be inefficient so they wouldn’t rob power at high speeds (clutched fans were pretty rare until the 70s).
Add 40-50 years of crud in the cooling system and they work even worse.
Thankfully, adding an electric fan usually results in success keeping things cool.
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bob and john
> Urambo Tauro
10/20/2016 at 19:11 |
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yes it does. air cooled engines tended to overheat faster in sitting traffic. Without the water/coolant there to take some of the heat, the overheating points comes much quicker then a water cooled car.
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Urambo Tauro
> Berang
10/20/2016 at 19:11 |
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That’s what I thought. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that they would even release these cars to the public with cooling systems that couldn’t handle sitting still. You’d think that they would have installed fans from the factory, be they electric or mechanical.
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Berang
> Urambo Tauro
10/20/2016 at 19:14 |
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I think most air cooled cars probably handle traffic jams better. Because the cooling system never “builds up” heat, it’s an open circuit, the hot air blows away.
In a liquid cooled system the water can absorb heat, but there’s only so much water in the system. If the radiator and fan can’t remove the heat from the water fast enough, eventually everything just gets too hot.
In the prewar years traffic was not very heavy, so cooling systems didn’t have to be that good. Postwar traffic put much higher demands on cooling though, and it took a little while for the designs to catch up.