[Vwdiesel] winter fronts

[Harmon Seaver]

On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 11:18:35AM -0500, Drew MacPherson wrote:
>
> VW sold winter fronts for their A1 and A2 cars as Autobahn accessories.
>
> The idea of blocking airflow through the rad has been around for a long
> time - farm and construction equipment utilized mechanically controlled
> louvres (or shutters) in front of the rad to help keep engines in the
> optimal operating range.  These shutters were standard equipment on many
> engines equipped to burn kerosense, and early diesels as well.
>

    Yes, I even owned a Mack with the louvers. But, what is the point of them if
you have the proper thermostat?

    I guess I was influenced early on, in highschool automech class, by a
teacher who said that ideally you wanted an engine to run just as close to
boiling over as possible without actually doing it, and, in fact, it would be a
whole lot more efficient if you could run it much hotter than that, which was
one of the reasons for designing vehicles with air-cooled engines (besides
weight and less parts) was that they were basically more efficient since they
could run with much higher temps.
    So one thing I've always done in the past was to put the hottest thermostat
I could get in any car I got my hands on. Now with computer controlled efi such
as I have in my Toyota 4x4, I'm not sure if messing with that is a good idea,
but it heats up very fast and there's never any lack of heat in the cab, so I
haven't bothered to look at it, but I put a 190 in my nissan diesel pu, and plan
to do the same with my '82 westy, when I get it back on the road once they quit
salting them.
    I guess my first experiment with raising the temp of an efi system will be
with my wife's RAV4 now that the warranty is over. It takes forever to heat up,
but I'll probably have to get a manual first to figure out how the efi works.


 --
Harmon Seaver
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com