Date:         Mon, 17 Jul 95 16:03:07 CDT
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Joel Walker <JWALKER@ua1vm.ua.edu>
Subject:      Re: Aircooleds and Airplanes

On Mon, 17 Jul 95 16:00:47 CDT Kevin Prichard said:
>On this subject, has anyone noticed, generally, if your air-cooled runs
>cooler in rainy (although not necessarily cooler) weather?  Perhaps a Rube

my old 80 bus used to drop the oil temp noticeably when we would run through
one of those summer showers ... i guess just from the water spraying up on
the bottom of the engine (and evaporating the heat away).

my current 88 bus, with the radiator up front, will also show a drop in
engine (coolant) temp when you pass into one of these "isolated showers".

>Goldberg solution for overheating during extreme heat is to rig up a
>5-gallon water bottle, a 12v electric pump, some hoses, and an atomizing
>nozzle.  Mount the nozzle near the fan intake, and voila!

this is not so "Rube Goldberg" as you might think. ;)  NASA and the electric
company up in north alabama found that if you put a very fine mist onto the
evaporator coils of a housefold air conditioner, it drastically improved the
heat transfer and made the a/c more efficient ... i.e., used less power to
cool the house better. so they rigged up some little dinky thing that had
a thermostat to tell the squirter/mister when to run.

that's been many years ago, and i haven't heard anything about it since ...
anybody know what happened to the idea? maybe it rusted the a/c?? :)

and in the southwest, years ago, weren't there some sort of Evaporative
Coolers for houses?? that used something like that to cool the house (instead
of a compressor system a/c)??

running the mixture rich: the new Cadillac Northstar engine management
system uses a version of this ... if the coolant is drained out of the
engine, the system shuts down four of the eight cylinders ... that is, the
four shut-down do NOT spark, but they still get fuel sprayed into the
cylinder. the fuel evaporates and takes heat away from those cylinders and
keeps the engine "alive" ... now, you're running a big heavy car on just
a four-cylinder engine, but it will get you out of the desert to some truck
stop. :)  where you'll need to fix the problem, add anti-freeze, and change
the oil (cause it will be VERY diluted with gasoline by that point!! not ALL
the gasoline evaporates ... some of it washes past the rings and gets down
into the crankcase).

now THAT's Rube Goldberg Engineering!!! :)