Coolant questions

[Guest]

Today I was porting and port matching the heads, disappointed on the amount of work this requires have done many heads in the past but these are among the worst I have tackled. Anyway to the point, has anybody modified the coolant passages?. The gaskets block most of the circulation passages and the manifold heating arrangement is to clever for it's own good and posses possible reliability problems.
Any insight to meaningful modifications will be appreciated.
So far I have scrapped the water pump (advise on circulation?) and got a EWP from Davies Craig, the larger one in alloy with variable speed control. Not happy with the idea of scrapping the thermostat as the kit suggests. Have tried that on my VMax with again Davies Craig electric water pumps but found thermosiphoning was not allowing engine to warm up enough. Will be mounting the pump where the battery now sits, which will be relegated to the rear.

John

[Sheepdip]

Hi John, the only bit I tried was reworking the waterway on one of the heads to match the inlet manifold , there is an overlap. However reading old articles, it suggests that this overlap is on purpose, the restriction is to balance the coolant flow coming out of the heads. Although the inlet gaskets look wrong they do match the gallery. Also I measured the pre work waterways and combined they exceeded the thermostat hole anyway. However in hindsight what I didn't do was check what the gallery matching looked like with the manifold bolted to each head (not sure how to do it, blow paint down?), since they're not dowelled there is a degree of movement, but checking old gaskets gives a good idea. Suffice to say the work made no difference to the running of my engine.

Paul

[Stagdad]

I'm doing away with the slots at the back of the manifold and am picking up off of 4 points on the heads 2from the transfer housings and 2 from the centre core plugs all going to a custom stat housing.will it work?we will have to wait and see

Cheers Steve

[ChasR]

When I acquired my Dolomite the consensus in the Dolly world was to ditch the thermostat as DC recommend but to block off the bypass hose, or to restrict the block to around a 2mm diameter hole. I believe a few of the Stag specialists also fit them in a similar manner (bar taking a heater hose from the suction side of the EWP).