We're still waiting for
our official SPCNS certificate to arrive in the mail from Sacramento. But we're not in a hurry.
We have permission from the state of California to drive the car whenever we want, at least
through February, and we even have insurance coverage. So now we're just looking for excuses to
drive.
Closest we can get to trunk cover with a camera
We installed all the snaps on our vinyl trunk cover last weekend, and glued on genuine Velcro(R)
hook-and-loop fasteners to keep everything from flapping around too much on the freeway. So far so
good, although something still needs to be done about the sewing job on the holes around the roll bar
supports, which look truly unfortunate if you get too close, or even if you don't. Despite that, we think the vinyl
cover looks better than the open wiring in the trunk, and the uneven row of exposed
rivets around the perimeter. Although not a lot better.
We also laid up our fiberglass hood scoop mold last week, and that looks even worse, but it's just a mold
and not the actual scoop so there's hope. We'll patch it up as best we can and see how it turns
out. In any case we can't worry about any of that now, because we have a more important project to take
care of, and that's getting the cooling system to work better. We've found on our longer drives that
we have to take it easy to keep the car from overheating, and we've also found that we don't like
taking it easy.
Hood scoop mold actually looks worse in person
The donor ran hot too, but we didn't worry about it back then because we figured it would
magically fix itself when we installed everything in the Locost. We're not exactly sure why that didn't
happen. Possibly the radiator is bad, so we're looking into new radiators, and we have a couple of
options on some aluminum models with big cores and extra cooling capacity. In the meantime we've
taken a couple of measures so that when we do overheat, we won't embarrass ourselves (again) by dumping
our expensive antifreeze all over the street.
We've long known that our radiator sits too low in the car. In every other automotive cooling
system in existence, the radiator header tank is the highest point in the system, so if you lose
coolant the header tank takes on a little air and steam, and the water jacket stays full. The
Locost cooling system isn't like that. If we lose coolant, air and steam fills the cylinder head,
where it just sits there and watches the valves fry. It's not quite that bad because the water pump
still gamely forces coolant into the head. But it's bad.
New tank takes over header duties from radiator
So we bought a new aluminum tank from Summit Racing, and we mounted it as high up in the car as we
could, which is not very high but still slightly higher than the cylinder head. We routed this tank
to the heater outlet on the head, which involved a lot of cutting, grinding, and welding, which we
managed to do without breaking anything, although as usual it's not pretty. We then routed the
radiator overflow to the new header tank, because the tank has an extra inlet fitting, and the
radiator overflow had to go somewhere.
So it's a little complicated, and also a little weird, but we should be okay so long as the
coolant continues to circulate as usual. The important thing is, coolant can't get out, except
possibly from the header tank pressure cap, which we'll eventually hook up to a plastic overflow
tank, which will catch anything the header tank loses, and possibly put it back when everything
cools down. We actually had a car like that once, seperate radiator, header tank, and overflow
tank, all shiny stainless steel. That car overheated too.
Bad filler
By far the best thing about rearranging our cooling system is that we got to get rid of our stupid
remote coolant filler pipe. We originally installed the remote filler because you can't check the
coolant level at the radiator, because it's too low and all of the water would spill out. For
pretty much the same reason you can't add coolant to the radiator, so the radiator is basically
useless for anything other than keeping the coolant from getting too hot, which by the way we now
know it doesn't do all that well either.
But the remote filler had it's own problems, not the least of which was sticking up out of the
hood like just about everything else in the engine bay. It also required a heavy-duty 21-25 lb. pressure
cap that was impossible to remove and replace, it added weight, it stretched the upper radiator
hose well beyond anything you'd consider normal, and it wasn't well supported so it was eventually
going to fail of its own accord. So getting rid of it was almost worth the $90 cost of a new header
tank all by itself. Although not quite. Maybe half of that.