I found this on ebay. I was wondering if their is any info floating around. Some cooling options were being discussed earlier today and figured I would throw this into the mix.

Porsche 914 New Fiberwerks Twin Barrel Cooling System

I think if it was belt driven, it would work great.

2cents

it's not new and IIRC, Zois had it on one of his 4 bangers

Maybe if you could install a monometer on eather side so you would know if the

fans quit.

I'd pay someone to let me borrow one for a day on the dyno.

I know what the results will be, but would like to prove it.

Junk

Electric fan can not do the job

I bet the engine wouldn't last an hour.

It probably works great at high continous RPMs but it would be to cold for street applications.

Who's 914 is that in the background?

Nope... Load= heat.

Those fans move alot of CFM, but don't make any pressure at all. Pressure is what forces air where it generally does not want to go, into the nooks and crannnies of the cylinders and heads...

Its time to kill the myth- I'm ordering one tomorrow. I'll test it against a stock system and a DTM on the same 160+ HP engine. The datalogger doesn't lie-

I would not throw too many stones at it without some testing as the Wayne Baker #22 IMSA 914 used a pair of relocated heater/vent fans blowing over the barrels and head area. They were in the passenger seat location and ducted through the firewall. The oil cooler took care of cooling the case.

Good job jake!!

Low RPMS it'll be fine.. But it cant push as much air reliably as fans at 7k rpms.

And what happens when an electric fan goes out?

Baker's system was way different..He also had air ducted into the area from the front of the car

I'm willing to throw some $ in to get that thing tested. I sent you an email Jake.

You're the man


Jake can do it, yes he can....ah shit, I forgot the rest...oh well

it looks cool but I wouldn't trust it.

With some ducts it might work better.

Ron Mistak now owns the car and it runs three fans. Two located in the passenger seat area, one each blowing through two hoses to the left and right side of the motor and one in the rear plowing on the two back cylinders.

Those radial fans have much better pressure characteristics than the large volume axial fans used in system in question.

We'll be busting this myth pretty damn quick! I want to wait till the new dyno is set up before I run the tests though, it'll be much easier, and faster than the current dyno set up.

Leo is guilty as is pretty much everyone that has ever asked about this fan or other questionable items without addressing this:

Is this item okay for.....

1) Race car?

2) Street car?

3) Both?


The generalization of "will this work"? is beyond vague...you need to ask "will it work in my application" (state application)

I like the idea of converting this fan to belt drive if it would work

I thought i read somewhere that those belt driven fans become less efficient as rpm increases....
provided those electric fans give enough air displacement, i guess one could duct air in a way to get higher pressures at sensible points in the engine... using diffusers and such...

I wonder how twin belt-driven fans in those locations would work...

I would prefer the fan mounted on top of the engine (like thomas' 914). Only prob with that... where do I put the intake manifold?

Or how about that cooling tin with a 6" duct to each from the front bumper with no fan....race car application.

And remember race car engines aren't built to last for years. Rebuilds of engines are SOP. Wayne Baker ran the crap out of his engines and I bet he had to rebuild them after each race.

This is just a thought, but isn't there something systematically wrong with having the two sides of your engine temperatures controled by two seperate fans? For instance, can you really guarantee that the two fans will run at the same rpm? Will one side run hotter, even if only marginally? Has Porsche ever implemented a system where each side of the engine has it's own cooling fan? This just seems unatural and imbalanced.

Wonder if they bleed air off to the oil cooler in that set up? You can't just dump air over the cylinders and hope it gets channeled to the cooler.

I can tell you now, that this arrangement is way under developed and obviously hasn't ever received comparative testing... They lack any of the things that make a system do it's best job.. This is a common trait with aftermarket cooling systems, the common thought is to put a huge fan on the engine and it'll be OK, thats pure horse shit!

The minister of truth will bring data to the table in a very short period of time, back to back from DTM and stock cooling systems on the same engine...



See those even temps from the DTM....

At any rate the fiberwoerks set up will help me test the new drag race engine that I'm working on, it lives for 11 seconds at a time!

As for using electric fans, some of the concerns pointed out above can be dealt with. Electronic control of electric motors is pretty straightforward, so it wouldn't be hard to make a closed-loop system : temp sensors in the cylinder heads determine the target air flow rate. The fans only blow as hard as they need to for any given heat load. Also, there's no longer a concern about a left/right imbalance. And an alarm could easily detect if a fan craps out.

Of course, there's another approach that just might do the job. Use water.

I thought we were talking about Porsches....

Jake, why waste your time testing this thing? I noticed that Fiberwerks doesn't even list the product on their web site anymore:

http://www.fiberwerks.com/prod01.htm

Don't laugh...
I have used a fuel injector pressureized with 60 PSI of water pressure to inject atomized water into the cooling fan..
The results are absolutely insane!!

oh do tell!

I was about to metion that, Jake.

Al Lager won Sebring with a squirter made out of a windshield sprayer. And he uses the same tech on many of his other cars. just a little water cools things down FAST!!! But relying on this will not be feasible on the street. Track only.

Can drop the temp 70 degress in a few seconds.

I have an engine that runs it on the street near every day... I tried the windshield washer set up, but nothing works as well as the atomized water arrangement from the injector.. You have to use distilled water though and I mix a tad bit of machine coolant with it to keep the injector lubed and happy...

Hey Aaron, project time!

Ahhhh.... Machine coolant!

Jake, you're a genius.

Do you put the injector unit before or after the fan? With Al's setup, he points the squirter straight at the fan blades, and that atomizes it pretty well.

If you installed a monometer on either side, wouldn't that make it a dualometer?

I was just trying to stir the pot. For my application I plan on installing an oil cooler up front. For that I use the search button

Jake,

If you're interested in testing more electric fan contraptions, I have one sitting on a shelf in my garrage that I'm likely not going to use for quite a while (if ever). I'd love to see this unit tested along with the others. If I ship it to you, would you want to set it up in testing with the others?

It's the aircooled classics single fan and shroud.

I know that we'd all love to see a true back-to-back comparison of as many different systems as we can.

This is a picture of the fan:
Click to view attachment

-Josh2

Stirring the pot a little more!

No reason that set up won't work in certain applications. One side of that set up is virtually identical to a Derale oil cooler set up I run on my race car. I run my cooler in the back alla OTTO's set up from OTTO's in Venice, CA. That way I can keep the front of the car flat. My set up is located behind the rear wheel of the car on the driver's side and pulls air from the trunk area. At speed it's good for a 35 to 40 degree drop in oil temps when the fan is turned on. I have an on/off switch on the dash of the car; that is how I know the fan makes that big a difference. It's simply pushing warm, engine heated air over the cooler but still shows that large a drop. I rarely see oil temps over 185 even on a 104 degree day at the track. NASCAR, Trans Am and WSC guys run similar set ups on their oil coolers, transmissions and differentials and they work.

The windshield washer set up is what my car came with. The original atomizer from the winsdshield wiper system went into a 6" cooling hose that was in front of the engine fan and there was a switch on the steering wheel to allow you to turn it on and off. I've removed it because with the oil cooler I haven't needed it.

The car also had brake ducting from the front valance with windshield wiper nozzles inside to cool the front brakes. Winshield washer bottle was in the front trunk and there was another switch on the dash.

Both of these set ups were used in Trans Am in the 80's and early 90's and I believe AUDI still uses water cooling on their brakes in some of their race cars.

I would be curious to know more about Al Lager and his car. Chris, if you read this, pm me and let me know where I can get information on him. I've tried for years to get information on my car and only know it was sponsored by Tecate beer and run in Mexico and at endurance races with some factory help to the team that had it during the late 70's and into the 80's. His car sounds similar and I wonder if there might be some type of history there.

Randy
"Car 54 Here I am" only G prod 914 Porsche in SCCA

Surely enviromentally friendly......

Send that baby this way! I'll need it for about 6 weeks!

This will be fun, as always and it'll give me some serious experience with the new dyno set up!

That's not your 912E is it???

Can you PM me contact and shipping information? I'll try to get it in a box and out the door sometime in the next week or so.

It's already been drilled for 2.0L heads (spark plug location). Will that work for ya?

-Josh2

That was my pic....they sucked. Fiber Werks dropped the program about five years ago. Something about product liability insurance.

Don't waste your time.

Raby Enterprises Inc
ATTN R&D
47 Raby Dr.
Cleveland GA
30528

Mike,
I know they suck, but its time to see just how bad! I hate guessing.

I'll post every bit of data collected from the tests right here.

I will need a verifier here during the tests though, anyone in the Atlanta area up for a couple days of vacation at Aircooled Heaven to witness the annihilation of some myths??

Well if you guys come up with a good solution to make a top mount fan for a 6 I got the cash ready.

Seriously I would be ready to drop the cash for a good top mount system as would lots of others I would imagine. Just doesn't seem anyone can do it without losing a ton of HP in the process. But it does look cool.

I've spent a significant portion of my career as a Thermal Engineer desiging, building and testing air cooling systems.

An electric fan only makes sense for a someone who doesn't mind expending MORE energy (i.e. gas) to cool their engine for the sake of quick bursts of acceleration (i.e. autocrossers and drag racers).

An efficiently designed blower (914's use blowers, not fans) moves lots of air at high pressure. If I took that same impeller (the spinning part of a blower), and hooked up the properly sized electric motor, I'm guaranteed to use up more fuel right off the bat because of the inefficiecy of an alternator and electric motor. Both create heat while generating or consuming power.

An ADVANTAGE of using an electric motor, is that the battery acts as a "reservoir" or dampner. When I hit the gas on an electrically powered air cooled motor, there isn't any initial additional charging load on the alternator (since the battery acts as the reservoir). I'm therefore freed up of the load on my crankshaft (temporarily) to allow more torque to accelerate the car. Very soon however, the battery will deplete enough that the alternator will be under full load, robbing the drivetrain of horsepower. You CANNOT get more efficient than mounting the impeller directly on the crank. BTW, if you do choose to use a belt drive for a horizontal fan, (ala Corvair, or 917) use one of those linked "tinkertoy" belts you see on "Norm's Shop", they (or their automotive equivalent) have been proven to be more efficient than a plain V-Belt.


Most cars today have electrically cooled radiator fans...however, they all have the radiators sitting in the airstream from the vehicle moving down the road. The electric fan is really only needed when you are stuck in traffic with engine idling (notice those gigantic fans you always see on chassis dynos?, the electric fan CANNOT generate the airstream needed to cool the radiator of an engine under load).

Unless you are an autocrosser, using electric cooling fans on a 914 is fuel wasting mistake.



A side note... the Beetles used welded steel sheetmetal impellers. These are better than fans, but are still nowhere near as efficient as the die-cast 914 impeller. All those little airfoils are big steps up from the "vanes" used by the Beetle. The only way to make the 914 blower a MORE efficient pumping system is to redesign it for a specific RPM. The idea of knocking out every other blade is a crude effort to take load off the crank, but in doing so, you are losing significant pressure.

Side note #2.. my favorite "Cooling Enhancement" I've ever seen on a 914 was at an PCA Autocross at Candlestick park. One guy had taken a piece of 6" HVAC ducting, and cut holes in a straight line from his front bumper, through the firewalls, and a straight shot right into the blower's intake.....

The main reason I am very interested in the alternate cooling methods. Autox. The car would still see occasional street and TT use though. So being able to efficiently cool the engine for prolonged use is critical. Hence, my interest in Jake's "shootout"...



My understanding was that the stock blower starts to cavitate about something like 4500 rpm, and its efficiency drops off as the rpms rise. The every other blade approach was the try to reduce the cavitation effect.



Bontempi did that on his EP car way back, others did to. The "sewer pipe" ducting... Fresh, cool, high pressure air fed to a blower with reduced blades.

-Josh2