[Vwdiesel] winter fronts

[Harmon Seaver]

On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 05:46:20PM -0500, Drew MacPherson wrote:
>
> One of the big reasons behind shutters was to keep the gas engine hot
> enough to burn kerosene.  These engines usually had special manifolds
> where the intake was wrapped in exhaust gas to make sure that the air/fuel
> mixture was hot enough to ignite from the spark plug.  When they came
> along, diesels also were a challenge to keep warm.

   When diesels came along? I think Rudolph Diesel built his first successful
engine in 1896. 8-)
   Actually my garden tractor has the option of burning
kerosene. You can get order a dual fuel tank and bigger jets for the carb, and
also a different (lower compression) head. I've also read of people wrapping a
copper fuel line around the exhaust manifold to heat up the fuel to lower the
viscosity. A lot of older gas tractors had this option, it's still quite popular
and widely used in Europe and the Third World. You have to start on gasoline,
get the engine hot, then switch over -- and also switch back to gas before
stopping.

>
> In the days before electric fans and thermostatic clutches, fans would
> pull a lot of air through the rad, and blow it back over the motor, which
> was also usually unshrouded.  I expect that in those days thermostats and
> cooling systems were not anywhere near as well designed as they are now
> either.
>
    Well, my first car was a '34 Ford coupe and it's little V8 put out enough
heat for that little cab, but my next ones, a '51 Merc and '54 Ford also seemed
perfectly adequate in the heating arena, and I know I put a hotter thermostat in
the '54 but more for power/efficiency than heat. And it was a convertible.
    The question is, however, why anyone in this day and age would be using
winter fronts or cardboard or whatever instead of thermostats. Seems bizarre to
me, especially the big trucks who you would think would be on top of something
like that.

> I've only run into one situation where a well-maintained VW diesel was
> unable to maintain operating temps at highway speed, and that was my 92
> 1.6 NA Golf, and at 60mph in -45 to -50C I needed a piece of cardboard
> over the grille to keep the coolant guage in the operating range.  Don't
> ever plan on having to do that again...
>
    Did you ever check the thermostat? I'll be it was stuck wide-open, which is
the normal fail-mode.



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