Radiator shouded

First, I hope everyone had a happy healthy holiday, and I wish you the best for the new calendar year. Any NewYears resolutions? This year, I again resolve to have my bus moving under its own power by year's end. Ok, I have made that resolution pretty much every year for the last 3, but I think it might actually stick this year. I've been fortunate enough to have had the last week off (without pay). With this open time, I've been able to clear off some honey-do-list items and still get something done on the bus. Since its NewYearsEve, I thought this would probably be short-ish, but if you've read my blog you know I'm not exactly brief. This one is no exception :)

Honey-Do
With any stretch of time off, there are going to be home projects to be completed. My house is no different. I had to move a few bookshelves (and all the books) from one floor to another, and tear down the indoor Christmas decorations. We re-arranged our bedroom a bit, but otherwise, the list was pretty short. I did have to re-clean the garage, though. It seems with all of the packages at Christmas-time, the rubbish just gets thrown into a heap in our sub-sized single-car garage. I think I ended up with 2 55-gallon drums worth of recycling out of it. Crazy.

One Fan
Once the garage was navigable again, I started poking around my shop bench. I didn't want to jump into the shrouding right away because I knew there was a hardware store stop blocking me, but I couldn't remember all the things I needed. So, I set to mounting the low-profile high-volume fan to the underside of the radiator while my coffee kicked in. The mounting instructions and hardware were perfect, and I had the fan attached without much trouble at all:
Set the fan where you want it. Make a little space with a thin nail between the fins to make room for the mounting sticks at points where holes in the fan housing align with space between the radiator runs. Then, thread through the fan housing, then through a foam spacer... through the radiator then through another foam spacers and finally through the keeper/foot. Last, cut the extra off the mounting sticks.

I set the fan to the rear, thinking I will add a second (slightly smaller) one on the front end when I get another $100 lying around. Since installing the fan is so easy, I see no reason to jump into that immediately. The wiring runs straight out the back, and consists of 2 wires, so it should be easy to wire it up. You can see from the picture on the left that the inlet/outlet is longer than the fan is thick. You can also see there's a little space between the fan and the radiator - this space is created with foam spacers to protect the radiator from the fan, and vibrations. These same spacers are on the feet on the other side.

Shrouding the Radiator
After the fan was on, I dashed to Lowes for the nuts and bolts I needed to mount the shrouding. Wrestling the shrouding onto the brackets took longer than I expected it to. In the end, I was able to get both sides bolted on. I think I'll have to do something across the underside to help hold the sides in. I was planning to re-use a furnace grate, and I think I still will. This would perform 2 functions: protect the underside of the radiator/fans and hold the sides against the radiator.

Vinyl
I bought about 20' of black vinyl irrigation tubing when I was at Lowes. My original thought was to use this tubing to protect the edges of the engine lid. I figured I wouldn't get cut a much, and it might help insulate the opening. I cut a slit along the tube and wrapped three sides of the "hatch door". I think it just might work. I took this idea to the radiator shrouding too. In my last post, I mentioned a concern for what happens when the radiator bounces up and hits one of the "junk tubes". Hopefully, this vinyl tubing will help reduce any bad breaks. Now that I see how it fits, I'll let it sit for a few days to get used to its positioning and then glue it into place. I'll be waiting on the hatch door until I'm ready to paint it before gluing it.

That's it for today. I hope everyone has a nice NewYearsEve.

pictures:
top - vinyl tubing along the "hatch door".
top mid left - low profile fan showing standoff space.
top mid right - fan disposition: near inlet/outlet end of radiator
lower mid - shroud mount point at front left corner
lower - shroud sides done. vinyl tubing on top. note fan mounting feet.