1968 Camaro Resto-mod 6.0/6 speed; Project Penny Pincher

[slazisme]

Lots of changes going since the last time I checked in, upgraded trans and engine, ECM.........nice!
Wanted to ask whether that rad with the single fan are up to the task, does it cool your new setup okay?

[ryeguy2006a]

It's funny that you bring that up. So far with all the driving I've done it has been keeping the engine cool and right around 195 where I want it to be. However yesterday which was 90*+ in NY it started to creep up into the 200's. The most concerning for me though was my IAT's that crept up to around 150! I think between the adding supercharger and heat exchanger that sits in front of the radiator that I'm hitting my limits on the 14" fan. I'm a little puzzled by the high IAT's though since my current setup was doing a pretty good job of keeping me around 25* above ambient. I'm not sure if I'm somehow getting hot air from the radiator that is sucking into the CAI, or if the shrouding of the Heat Exchanger will make the difference. Let the Trial and Error begin!

[andrewb70]

It's funny that you bring that up. So far with all the driving I've done it has been keeping the engine cool and right around 195 where I want it to be. However yesterday which was 90*+ in NY it started to creep up into the 200's. The most concerning for me though was my IAT's that crept up to around 150! I think between the adding supercharger and heat exchanger that sits in front of the radiator that I'm hitting my limits on the 14" fan. I'm a little puzzled by the high IAT's though since my current setup was doing a pretty good job of keeping me around 25* above ambient. I'm not sure if I'm somehow getting hot air from the radiator that is sucking into the CAI, or if the shrouding of the Heat Exchanger will make the difference. Let the Trial and Error begin!

Time for a real fan...C7...6th gen Camaro...Volt...whatever fits.

[joeko23]

Ryan, do you have the stock thermostat (195)? If so those temps are normal. I have the stock thermostat in mine and I feel like it only opens around 210, then the temp drops to about 205 and just says there. I had the car idling for over 30 mins in 90+ degree and it didn’t budge over 206.

As far as iat, hook up the intercooler pump to run without the engine and see if it stop at any point. If it does you have air in the system. When I was filling my system up, I contanstly had to add more coolant, turn the pump on, then it turned off, I would add more coolant, and squeeze all the hoses, jiggle them etc. add more coolant turn on the pump again and repeat many many times until the pump ran non stop for 30 mins or so. Here is a video I followed it worked for me. I bought the 1” inside hose about 8” and filled with coolant. When the level didn’t drop anymore while the pump is running that’s a good indication that the air is out. But I think the key is really to squeeze the hoses, jiggle them etc. you have pretty long hoses since you have the CTSV hat and you routed them through the fender, I bet you have a bunch more air in the system.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QgNS9fVJbco

[ryeguy2006a]

I do have a stock thermostat, but I thought that they were a 187* unit, not 195*.

I did my best to purge the air out and did just like you described by continuing to add coolant. It's at a point where it seems full and doesn't need anymore coolant but maybe I'll play around with it to see if there is a pocket trapped somewhere. I also have a larger Edelbrock reservoir that I am going to add to see if that helps. I'm in the process of modifying the mounts for the HX so that I can gain more room to potentially add a fan behind the HX while also adding some shrouds to seal it better to the radiator. I'll report back my findings.

[eviltwin_1987]

Making a shroud to isolate the filter from the engine heat would probably help as well.

[slazisme]

Regarding the air in your system, I remember reading somewhere that using one of these help keeping air out of the cooling system when filling.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095447Z36...xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==
Another tip when filling is to jack up the front end, getting the air pocket to rise up, worth a try.

[Bugzilla]

You have to keep in mind that even though the stock thermostat is a 187°, its on the lower hose which is the cold side. That meaning the water coming out of the cold side of the radiator needs to be 187° before the t-stat opens. Typically that puts the head temp around 205° when its actually open (depends greatly on the radiator too). LS engines like running hot, so even if you were to get up to 220°, I wouldnt worry about it.

What are you doing about the bleed ports on the top of the heads? Did you block all 4 corners? Bypass on the front ones? Do you crack the bleed ports open after its full of coolant?

[ryeguy2006a]

Sounds like I need to make some adjustments to my fan on/off settings. I'm running the front crossover, the rears are factory riveted shut, but I did crack the bleeders to get all the air out. When I'm crusing normally the car runs around 189-192*, and I think my fan temps were like 198 on and off at 190. Maybe I'll do a 205/198. Any thoughts?

I finished up the shrouds for the HX, so I'm going to do some testing to see if that makes any difference to IAT's and/or ECT's.

[joeko23]

Try to Hotwire the intercooler pump so you can see if it runs continuously. Just to know for sure you don’t have air in the system.

[67coupe]

Long time lurker here, infrequent poster, but I just spent 2 days reading through all of this. LOL! I absolutely love this build and appreciate your documenting everything. It was very cool to see all of this come together. You've also created some great reference material for future folks.

Thanks so much for sharing everything!!

-Jason

[ryeguy2006a]

Hi Jason, thanks for the compliments. Glad that my build was your first post after all these years! That's a compliment in itself.

Thanks for all of the input and feedback guys. I used almost all of those tips and believe that I've fixed the high IAT issues. I'll get into that shortly. I finally got around to doing my first oil change to change out the break-in oil and assess for any bad news. I'll be honest I was kinda dreading this and put it off. I was pleasantly surprised to find no major metal shavings or chunks in the oil. To be expected after all new bearings, there was a slight amount of glitter in the filter, but nothing in the oil that I drained out.





Then I swapped on a new matching set of plug wires to get rid of the mismatched set I had before.



I made some templates out of cardboard, and modified my HX brackets to tip the whole exchanger forward.





Once I was happy with the fitment, I welded the brackets back together. I also removed the J-nuts that I had before and drilled/tapped the brackets so it all fit a little tighter.



I was really happy with the cardboard templates, so I made some shrouds out of a spare piece of stainless plate I had.



Added some side filler plates and trimmed the upper piece up for a cleaner look.





Hard to get a picture of the "finished" product, but I wanted to test it out before I went and painted everything. That way if I had to modify it, I wasn't re-doing anything. Took the car out for a drive and unfortunately it didn't seem to help much at all. Slightly lower, but the temps still crept up to about 140* AND it was a cooler day than when I had the really high temps. Then I hot wired the pump like was suggested and watched everything. Well come to find out after about 3-5 minutes of running the water gets aerated! The water looks almost gray. So then I would kick the pump on and watch the water flow through the stock clear reservoir. What was happening inside is that the high volume circulation pump I have was draining the feed hose before the return could feed it more coolant. Once it all leveled out, the water became aerated. Air mixed with the water doesn't bode well for cooling. Thankfully I bought an Edelbrock reservoir a few weeks ago so I quickly hooked that up to see if this would help. Well it certainly did as ended up adding around 60oz of water even though that reservoir is only about 32oz. I kept working the hoses and shaking the HX and more and more air bubbles came out.

Went out and tested again with the newly installed reservoir and Bingo, that was the issue. Air in the system and a powerful circulation pump that was draining the lines. Oh and the JD bottle was for spill support not moral support haha.



After letting the car idle around this is what the temps ended up being. I bumped the on/off temps for my coolant too and that seemed to help with my radiator cooling too. It was about 78* when I took that picture.



Then I took the car to my favorite road, and let it spin through 3rd.



Going up my driveway I found this little guy running around. Had to chase him back into the fence haha. Sometimes I'm so glad that I have these guys as neighbors, rather than people haha.



My dad and I went to another car show on the 4th that was about 20 mins away. All the temps kept in check and it was a good time. I remembered to take some pictures this time!







To top off a great day at a car show and the car running tip top, I looked down on the way home at my MPG's. Cruising around it was clocking around 20-22 mpg. I took a picture and sent it to a few of my buddies where on coast, it was clocking over 30+ mpg's haha.



Can't wait to put some more miles on it. Next Sunday I have my second AutoX event, so I'm really looking forward to that. So glad that I got all of the bugs worked out.

Cheers,
Ryan

[srode]

Gotta love the repurposing of the JD bottle

[Hotwire]

Great job Ryan!

To get a finer detail on your cut filter I usually do the following:

- get a cheap utility knife/ box cutter with the snap off blades, usually on the counter (like these. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L7RSHLR...NTYNC2G851D76Z )
- cut the filter all the way through the pleats as close to the metal end caps as you can.
- fold the pleats together into a block, wrap in a shop rag, and place in a vice to squeeze as much oil out as you can. This takes a hair of patience to keep everything lined up while pressing. Makes viewing debris in the filter media much easier.
- spread pleats out and look it over with a good light, will be easy to see into the valleys for any trapped contaminants.

https://flic.kr/p/2kUZ4kC

Also on the fans, I've got a set of 02 Camaro fans on my chevelle that work great. If you have the room I recommend them. My radiator is a down flow design (original style) , have the fans wired like gm did in the Camaro, series in low, parallel in high, does the job.

Here's the dimensions. https://ls1tech.com/forums/conversio...imensions.html

[ryeguy2006a]

Thanks for the tip Hotwire! I'll have to try that next time as I already pitched the filter...

I wanted to do a "stress test" to see if my current setup could hold temperature or if I needed to upgrade to a larger/better fan. I got my wish by accident and was stuck in stand still traffic earlier this week. It was around 80* and cruising down the highway the ECT was around 190-192 with the IAT was around 95. That's where the engine temps normally ran the last two years with the LS1, so I was stoked because it was really efficiently cooling the new motor AND the IAT's are right where they should be around 20* over ambient. Well that changed when I was in stand still traffic for about 15-20 mins. I changed the fan temps to come on at 200 off at 205, so the engine temps went up to around 205 pretty quickly and the IAT just slowly gained a degree or two every minute. I had to pick up my wife from the service department for her car, and by the time I got there the engine temps were around 225 and the IAT's were 140. The temps just slowly creeped up which tells me that the fan just couldn't keep up.

I was hoping to get through the summer with this fan, but I don't want to hurt something by pinching pennies, so I picked up a low mileage take off C7 fan. Not sure if I'll try and use the stock shroud or make my own mount in my existing shroud. I want to get my hands on it and I'll make that decision later. It should be a huge difference. My cheapo eBay fan is rated around 2000 CFM, but I extremely doubt that is true. Maybe half of that. I found a company online called DeWitts who tested the stock C7 600 watt fan vs their upgraded 19" fan. The stock fan tested at 2900+ CFM at 90% duty. This should work really nicely for my needs.

[ryeguy2006a]

I'm happy to report that the C7 fan install is now complete. I really liked how my current shroud covered the entire core so I wanted to find a way that I could mount the fan assembly to it. I started by removing the shroud and then test fitting the unmodified C7 fan.



The picture makes it look bigger than it is, but it has about 3/4" on both sides of the shroud when centered. Just way too deep and needs to be trimmed down. First picture is unmodified and mocked up. Could definitely be used as is, but I wanted it to fit tighter to the radiator.





Here's a close up of the motor. The 600 in there means that it's the 600 Watt version of the C7 fan. The earlier models could have come with a 500 Watt version.



I also debated on removing the fan from the shroud and making my own custom mount similar to what VA does with their aftermarket fan for 67-69 Camaro's. It fits nearly perfect in the 16" fan opening.



This is a VA shroud for my car that I saw at a Car show this past weekend. I think that is based of the Gen6 Camaros as it uses an even bigger 850 Watt fan!





Problem that I didn't want to deal with was how far away from the shroud it was going to sit. I could have fabricated something, but I didn't want to do that at this point.



One thing that was pretty interesting was that the inside of the fan shroud has these little ribs that are the same depth the entire way around the inside of the shroud. Stock there are 4 of those ribs, so after deciding that I as going to modify the C7 shroud, I cut 2 ribs off which was about 5/8".



With the 2 ribs cut, you can still use the stock mounting tabs, but since my radiator wasn't quite wide enough to easily use them, I decided to cut another two. Ended up being quite a bit of material that I removed.



I took measurements before and after cutting and the shroud must be parallel since the measurements were the same. Width is 21 3/8", side height is 13.5" and the height at the center is 15 3/8"





Here is right before one of the final test fits. I found that in between two of the ribs for the upper part, it lined up perfectly with the upper nuts that were already on the shroud. For the rear, I found a space between two ribs, but added my own Rivnut. Really easy and mounted very solidly.



Then I mounted up a 70 amp breaker for the fan. It draws a lot of juice and this was recommended to me by Andrew. I was able to use a little pillar and threaded a bolt I had into it for a solid mount. Very pleased with how it all came out. I had a few missing "flaps" and found a guy on a Corvette forum who had a few spares. So they are on the way, but for now I made a few temporary pieces. I'm not sure if I will end up trimming the shroud in front of the "flaps" to encourage more airflow at speed or not. I want to run it and see how it performs. If I am not getting the cooling I want I'll modify them for more airflow.



Installed in the car and ready to wire up. I'm really pleased with how it turned out.





I bought some more 8 ga wire, a 70 amp circuit breaker and a Yazaki connector kit (bought on eBay) with an assortment of terminals to get it all wired up.





I found that my big crimpers did a great job on the open barrel terminals once I bent them over slightly. One thing on this connector that was a little different was there is this inner white locking piece that had to be popped up in order to insert the terminals into the slots. Otherwise it was very straight forward.



Used some appropriately sized terminals and glued heat shrink. I didn't get any pictures, but the ground side goes directly to the battery. The positive side goes from the connector, to the breaker, then directly to the battery. From all my research it is critical to get the appropriately sized wire for this job. You will not be able to get away with 12 ga wire. According to Spal, this wire could get hot enough to melt the connector, so make sure the wire is sufficiently sized for the job.





The last thing was adjusting the tune in Holley to use a pwm- signal rather than a straight ground. I tested it in the garage and it worked great. I didn't get a chance to test it as it was raining, but I'm hoping to within the next few days.



Thanks,
Ryan

[Motown 454]

It looks like a nice fix, that should have plenty of flow.

[Just 1 More]

How is that C7 fan working out and where did you source one from?

[ryeguy2006a]

I'm pleased to report that the fans are working really well. I actually got stuck in stand still traffic over the weekend for about 15 mins and the temps stayed in right around 202-204. I have them commanded to come on at 202 and off at 198. The IAT's were good as well. They were around 90* cruising and crept up to around 108 and pretty much stayed there. The ambient temps were right around 70, so I'd like to do a stress test to find out what it does if the temps are 85-90 doing the same thing.

I'm still running the fan shroud as is and never cut open the inside. I think that I'm going to modify it to give the fan a more open space to draw the air from. I think that may encourage more airflow to possibly lower the IAT's. When I'm cruising down the highway I'm usually about 15-20* above ambient, so I know that it's cooling efficiently.

[Bugzilla]

You can borrow the weather out here for a stress test whenever you would like. Only supposed to be 108° tomorrow.