[Land-speed] Making your Tow Truck Automatic live a long life.PART 2

[ifixmgs at cox.net]

Mayf,

I have a 502 Bowtie/400 turbo in a  90 Suburban 1500  that doesn't go anywhere without a trailer behind it.   Our biggest is an all steel 1970's era 32' Philips horse trailer that's built like a tank.  With 2 big horses, and all of our equipment, it weighs in at 9500  pounds.  My alum radiator (junk yard special) was for a stick shift and my budget for a Jegs trans cooler was blown.     I found a 2" thick room-sized AC condenser with 3/8" tubes.  I mounted it up front and horizontally on the right inner fender with a small  Nipondenso cooling fan mounted on the underside pulling cooler air up from  the road.   The trans fluid (regular petro) has stayed  clean, bright red and smelling like new.   As I recall from   SAE notes when ATF   operates at 200*f for any length of time service life goes to half of Mfgr normal change sched.  And I'm pretty sure it gets cut in half with subsequent 20-25*f increases in op-temp.  

When I was crew chief on a winged supermodified car in the 70s, we had occassional engine oil temp problems on dusty, muddy tracks. I sealed a forward section of frame rail and filled it with a half gallon of water thru a  screw-in shrade valve hole, and  pressurized it to 50 psi. A very small 1/8"  ball valve operated by a choke cable routed a length of brake tubing to the oil cooler.  The far end of the tubing was pinched off tight and a line of small (maybe 1/32") holes faced the oil cooler.  Toward the end of the race when the cooler would choke up with dust and dirt, and oil temp started rising way up, the driver opened the valve and sprayed down the oil cooler.  It worked well enough for the effort that went into it, and didn't have any further main bearing wear problems.     

Same principle could be applied using a pressurized, insulated air tank with chilled water, a nitrous or 12v landscaping solenoid, and   a fogging spray bar  across the radiator or trans cooler, and/or on top of the  trans housing for heavy uphill tows.  The colder  the top of the alum  trans gets , the faster heat will be carried off and the less work the cooler has to do.    Only problem is that going across the desert in 120 heat hauling a 5,000 pound trailer might take a water tender and one of those towable air compressors..... 
Mark C 


Back in the '60's when Ed Tradup  was running a digger, he had an old
> > International tow truck that he had stuffed a big GM V-8 with TH-400 into.
> > For a cooler he put a big AC condenser from the same car between the
> > frame rail's. It worked like a champ, not the best location but it was so 
> > big
> > it 
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