Watercooling hoses through longs?, I need feedback from those who've done it. Options

[pktzygt]

I'm finalizing my Suby conversion and I can seem to make myself put the cooling lines under the car.

I can think of one person (Britain) who has put the cooling hoses in the longs, but I was hoping to get some feedback on the difficulty of installation and how well it works form some suby or V8 guys. Part of the problem is that I haven't ever cut into the longs myself.

One one hand I don't want to put extra heat in the cabin or lose foot space but on the other, I hate the shortcut look of the under car routing.

Do the bends in the hose cause cooling issues?

Can the hoses go into the longs without taking foot space?

Should I put them under the car and re-route them as a future winter project?

Thanks!

[skeates]

I'm in the process of doing a suby conversion myself and have elected to route the coolant line through the longs. I haven't gotten too far yet, but from some brief mock-ups I don't think that you loose enough cabin space for average size people to notice.

I'm not too worried about the additional pressure losses by having the two additional near 90 degree bends in the hose. Especially since I will be running 1.5" and 1.25" hose (a little bit bigger than stock suby hose as I understand it). The increased diameter will help to reduce the pressure drops introduced by the bends. While I have the longs open I plan on installing some insulation on the passenger compartment side of the coolant hoses to help encourage the heat to transfer away from me. BTW, the whole thing will be designed to facilitate (relative) easy removal and installation of the hose, so serviceability shouldn't be a problem.

One solution I considered (but elected not to implement because of the work) was to cut open the bottom length of the longs and then weld in a piece of 3" tubing that I would cut in half like a clam shell. This would give the hose a nice hidden length to run while keeping it exposed to the air for cooling. But to do this I figured that I would have had to open the top of the long afterwards and install some gussets to maintain the long's rigidity. You might be able to squeeze out a 5 degree drop in you water temps from the added cooling when traveling at freeway speeds and running finned tubing instead of rubber. I originally wanted to do this in an effort to reduce the size of my radiator and free up room in the front trunk. But after running the calcs I figured that I wouldn't be able to squeeze out enough cooling capacity from the finned tubes to make it worth the investment in effort.