So, on to some truck stuff for a change. I am way behind on post about the service/modifications that support the travels that seem to take the spotlight around here. Things are not always rainbows and unicorns with this thing and a significant amount of maintenance/service/modifications occur behind the scenes to try to keep our adventures hand tool-free. I have no issues changing a part that is kind enough to fail in my driveway or around town here. A part that fails away from home, but still allows me to get home is the next best kind. All vehicles have parts that fail (even brand new vehicles) and doing what we do, a keen eye, ear, etc is required to keep the back country travel uneventful in the mechanical department.
One part that has become a recurring issue are my electric fans on the intercooler. These are mainly used at low speed on the trails to keep the large belt driven fan off as much as possible and also to increase airflow across the condenser when the a/c is on. A little back story on the fans I use; they are Hayden 12" curved blade pushers that I have been using for decades as pushers on every other vehicle in my fleet (all of which see more hours of service in summer than this truck does). All of those vehicles still have the original ones I installed in them. The Suburban on the other hand has barfed one in an electrical smokeshow on the trail out of Fossil Creek a few years back. I changed both out with new ones so as to not have an issue with either again. While doing that I made new aluminum mounts welded to the intercooler and engineered them in such a way I could drop a fan out the bottom and not have to disassemble the whole grille structure. That worked great until I installed that gigantic winch behind the bumper (which places it under the intercooler, thus blocking my great plan to drop a fan out the bottom). Enter ANOTHER dead Hayden fan into the picture. Can't drop it out the bottom. Have to disassemble grille structure. I don't want to. It needs to be done. Still don't want to. I'm sick of changing Hayden fans. I decided I needed to change them both again--to a different brand this time. I've been installing Spals for a while now in other vehicles, so I opted for a pair of those to replace these. The pictures of the Spals looked like the same housing, but when they arrived they were different. All of those nice brackets I made to support the Hayden fans had to be cut off and remade. Swell. Not only that, the Spals use a mounting setup that is the same style, but quite different at the same time. It took me a bit to come up with a mounting setup that would give the support these things need.
New brackets:
Spals mounted:
These things move a bunch more air and also make a fair bit more noise as well. Nothing obnoxious, but noticeable. Hopefully their service life will be measured in decades and not weeks...
One nice thing about living and traveling in the desert is the bugs are small and fairly dry. Once we get out of the desert, the bugs get larger and much juicier. Many times while traveling through an area that bugs are greasing my windshield to the point visibility is becoming an issue, I start wondering about the immediate health of my cool-pack. If my windshield looks like this, you can bet the intercooler and condenser are looking the same or worse. I ALWAYS thoroughly wash the heat exchangers when I have a component out, but out on the road, that really isn't an option. I decided to add a stainless wire cloth behind the grille. Simple enough, but not quite so. Luckily a buddy of mine introduced me to the evils of the screen once upon a time when he added some to his racecar and instantly had cooling issues. Come to find out there are three dimensions to the wire cloth. Diameter of wire, size of hole, number of holes per inch. All of these contribute to calculate the open area. So, great, where to start... I took some vernier calipers to work and measured the dimensions of the cloth on a Mack, a Sterling, a Freightliner and an International. Interestingly, they all used cloth with the exact same dimensions. So I set out to get some cloth with those dimensions. I couldn't find any. I could come close, but not the same. I did find an online calculator that you can put each dimension into and find out what open percentage of area you have and it is absolutely amazing how a small change in one dimension can cut open area DRASTICALLY. It took an evening with the calculator and some online sources to find something close to what the tractors use. I went with a little more open area and still lost 1/3 of the area to wire. Yep, cut airflow across the cool pack by 1/3. Wow. It is noticeable in how often the fan clutch engages in the heat, but the amount of junk it keeps out is well worth it. The cooling system is big enough to deal with the airflow loss and not have a detrimental on engine temperature.
I also added the bowtie to the grille. It is an authorized GM reproduction and it already looks like crap. Water got into the blue area and the sun faded it out. Good job china.
I wanted to try some more noise abatement up front. It's actually fairly quiet inside, but some quiet is good, more is better. One thing I had done nothing to was the hood. The hood acts like a big sound radiator and all that sound goes right through the windshield because normal glass has absolutely no sound dampening properties whatsoever. After much research both online and people in the know, the most popular method I found was Line-X. So off came the hood and to Line-X we went.
After:
It turned out pretty good. Does it work?? Yes and no. It definitely kills lower frequencies. Heavy engine sounds etc. Unfortunately, this "unmasks" the higher pitch sounds. Now it sounds like someone cranked the volume on the higher frequency turbo whine. Not terrible, but much more noticeable. It really isn't that bad because the high pitch sounds are more of an annoyance than the lower pitch which are great contributors to driver fatigue. We don't want that. All in all, I feel it was worth the time and money and definitely helped a situation that didn't seem that bad to begin with. Win-win.