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!

[bulitt]

Has anyone used rectangular tubing on the bottom? I'm sure the turbulence would be terrible but a 5/8"x 2.5" would probably suffice and would hug the floor. Would need round tube welded on the ends??
Also if you have radiators in the front and want AC where does the condenser mount? is there still room left on the floor for the condenser? What does that do to the rigidity of the front end with holes in both the wheel wells and the floor?

[Katmanken]

Has anyone used rectangular tubing on the bottom? I'm sure the turbulence would be terrible but a 5/8"x 2.5" would probably suffice and would hug the floor. Would need round tube welded on the ends??

Think of the fluid flow as a river. At the banks of the river, the flow is always zero due to friction. As you move to the center of the river, the flow increases up to a maximum (at the center). Same thing occurs in a round pipe. Larger the diameter of the pipe, the more area there is for the central high speed fluid flow, and the zero flow at the edges is minimized. So the rough rule of thumb for pipes is: farther away from the outer wall, the greater the flow for a given pressure.

Now make the pipe rectangular with minimal height and a wide width. Since the center line of the pipe is close to the horizontal top and bottom, the friction will constrict the flow and more pressure will be needed to ram the water through.

It's not so much turbulence you need to worry about with incompressible fluid flow (liquids) as the pipe friction and the minimum distance to the center of the pipe. The smaller the distance, the greater the resistance to flow. Laminar and turbulent really come into play with compressible fluid flow (gas).

Hope this helps.