Air cooled engines (Page 1 of 2)

A bigger oil sump should help with engine cooling, especially in an air-cooled motor. You can spend big bucks on kicked out oil pans from Moroso and the like, but it's not hard to DIY if you have someone on your team who is handy with a welder. Cheers.

Now this advice comes with the knowledge that we overheated our VW car last year because of a stupid not paying attention issue while building the motor in a hurry.  But I have never over heated my Class 9 off road car so....

What kind of air cooled motor are you going to run? I have lots of experience with VW and Porche based Flat motors from racing off-road.   My advice would be 50 weight oil, external cooler with electric fan.  You should be just fine if you do that.  www.race-dezert.com is a great place to see pictrues of other peoples cars and how they set them up for cooling.  I would stay away from a corvair simply because of parts availability.  Of course Jay and the guys like rare and hard to find cars better than average cars so there may be something there.

If it is a VW based car love to chime in on what we did and I can tell you after Houston what worked and what did not for two differnt years with an Air Cooled Motor.

We overheated, but only because we had a fan belt come off and didn't have a working warning light.

My limited understanding says that electric fans are useless (our cooling fan uses north of 15 hp at high rpm, that's 11 kW or 1000 (!) amps from a 12V electrical system).  I think that if you run a good synthetic oil, run conservative jetting and timing, and make sure that the cooling system is in good shape (i.e. all cooling fins clean, all shrouding in place and sealed up properly) you should be fine.

You can also get a CHT pretty cheap if you look.

Remember that super high viscosity oils are a throwback to the old days when they sheared down under the heat....If you can go down to a 20W-50 racing synthetic you can improve the hell out of your oil cooler performance...When Mobil 1 first came out in the 'Seventies I was stunned at how temperatures dropped...of course if your bearings have a quarter inch of clearance or it leaks/burns oil, it can get expensive...

The water spray is a good Idea. we need to add weight to the front any way so water would work.  Since the engine is in the back I dont know if I want to run the oil cooler all the say up to the front.  I am guessing oil pressure may be an issue with a old used engine. I do think the extra lines would allow for more cooling but I need to find out what a pump and the hoses wold cost. RE  budget.

Thanks for the suggestions.

So VW experts. How are you guys handling the oil starvation issue? We tested the Karmann Ghia over the weekend and we can barely turn without sloshing everything away from the pickup.

I was thinking the little sump cup thing that the formula vee cars use - they certainly corner harder than us, but is that enough?

The Unsafe at Any Speed guys at Reno had unfortunately removed a lot of the Corvair's ducting in an attempt to cool the car down but I think it had the opposite effect, not to mention the panel that allows hot air from the heater into the engine compartment (for severe winter use) was off which probably hastened their doom even before the fan belt broke. IMHO if one is to run a Corvair I'd keep the ducting as stock as possible, design some sort of air scoop to run cool air into the engine compartment and if possible try to copy the vertical fan setup the Yenko guys used later on. A big oil cooler wouldn't hurt either, I know one of the racers back in the '60s just bolted his onto the top of the fender in a very lemony manner, sounds perfect!

the bugpack mesa cooler would be a great addition if you can find on used.

Karmann Ghia here. The bug guys broke something in their transaxle. We brought them a crappy one Sunday morning but I think they drank too much Saturday night to pull it apart and salvage parts out of it.

We had a few issues - our biggest problem was the fuel pump - we went through 3 over the weekend. Since our car was a flooded hurricane car, we had some other issues as all the rusty bits gave way. We'll need to replace the steering box before the next race, a couple of shocks, the carb that leaks, and the distributor - we could probably skip the last one, but we've got about 10 degrees of fluctuation in the timing now.

Oh - also we were slow, even on Sunday when we were literally firing on all cylinders. But the car corners pretty good and was fun to drive. We might have half a chance for IOE if we can keep the car on track next race.

The fastback was kicking ass on Saturday until they spun and got collected by an RX7 - it cracked the housing on their transaxle. AFAIK they didn't have any mechanical issues when they were running.

sounds like we have some helpful vw people here! Does anyone know if that bugpack sump will work on a type IV vw motor? definately interested in that for our 914

Mixed displacement. What could possibly go wrong? So what kind of car is it?

This will be cool!

KT