Al Goodman overdrive water pump pulley plans

Trev, it was probably the other side of the street.

A mate of mine said it was sunny once....... but I don't believe him !

A "Bright Spark" down here in Australia plumbed in an electric inline water pump in place of the bottom radiator hose with good results. The motor runs cooler and has not boiled, however it looks terrible hanging at the side of the engine. The hood is best kept closed.
Henry Portz more efficient water pump impeller would be my choice.

The UK IS a pretty "COOL" country ......ALL YEAR.....EVERY YEAR !!!

Trevor my understanding is that the UK is a pretty cool country for most of the year.

So far mine has had no issue, but it does answer my curiosity.

The cooling system is designed to run at atmospheric pressure. You can add a 2 psi pressure cap but it just means you will boiler over a few seconds to a minute later. I would not put any higher pressure cap as the system is not designed to handle it. Your best bet is to correct the overheating problem.

I noticed that that there is no pressure cap, so presumably it is a zero pressure system. Which must lower the boiling temperature. Is a conversion any use ?

Jim, thank you for the detailed response, it is very helpful. I think that the shroud is a great idea as the Cord fan covers such a small amount of the radiator area and also overlaps the top tank. My car has the Bohnalite cylinder heads and I also have screens at the radiator inlets. I recently put new high flow 160 degree thermostats in and blocked the intake manifold cross over inlets. After the recent overheating I drained the system and pulled out the screens which were still very clean. I had hoped to find a bunch of junk in them as that would have been such an easy fix. Looking into the top tank of the radiator I do see some whitish chunky stuff in the tops of some of the tubes. I am not sure if it got past the screens or maybe has just been there since I got the car about a year ago. I will proceed with pulling out the radiator for cleaning and see how that improves things. My car has a long history as a good driver having been driven from California to the ACD meet in Auburn at least 3 times so I am sure that I can get it back to that state.
Thanks again.
Bill

I run Tefba filters and never take them out. Easily cleaned by draining water below the filter. They are not hidden though. If there is Aluminum in the engine you will get much crap that plugs up rad.
CORDiallyMike

Thank you Jim. I did not think overheating was an issue with the higher capacity heads. I plan to run low temp thermostats. Plugged off the intake manifold and hopefully find a drawing for the fan shroud. I will be running screens till I see nothing coming out of the block too.


Gary Parsons

Gary, Cord wioll overheat with the higher capacity heads.

Bill the priblem with trying to clean out the block with the engine in the car is is getting the junk out of the block. you only have a small drain hole in the bottom of each side. some of the pieces that come off won't fit thru the hole. About the only way to to it with the engine in the car is to pull the heads and go down thru the cooling holes and vacuum the crap out.

There is a chance your radiator may be partially blocked. These engines have a tendancy to puke a bunch of junk into the radiator, especially if they have been sitting for a while. The best way to prevent this is to put screens in the radiator tubes onb top of the engine. Clean them once a year, more often if needed. You will be suprised at the amount of junk they collect. Also if the engine pukes the screens plug and you overheat quickly. Hut it's a quick fix to clean the screens instead of pulling the radiuator to have it boiled out.

Years ago I tried all the different fixes for overheating. Most of them had a small effect on overheating. The one fix that really helped was installing a fan shroud on the radiator. This eliminated the overheating in most cases. A cord will still overheat at prolonged slow speeds (such as a parade) or when you slow down after a high speed run.

What temp thermostats are you using? What heads are on the engine? The higher capacity heads are almost guaranteed to never allow overheating. Personally I would have cleaned out the cooling system BEFORE installing the Portz water pump. If you have the radiator cleaned maybe you might install coolant screens in both returns to the radiator to protect the new water pump seals. Just keep them clean till no more crud shows up. Then return the system to not use the screens.


Gary Parsons

Thank you Jim, this is great. I am not sure if I will do this or not but I am exploring options for improving the cooling in my Westchester. This last weekend I did about an hour long drive and experienced overheating about 2 miles away from home. I have a second temperature gauge sensing the right head temperature and had an eagle eye on it as the temperature slowly increased during the drive and I had to pull over to cool down.
I recently installed the Henry Portz water pump kit in the car so I don't suspect a pump issue. I will be pulling the radiator out for a good cleaning however it is one of the honeycomb styles and I am concerned about the lower flow of those radiators. Additionally the extremely thick core (4 inches) of the Cord radiators is not conducive to good air flow through the radiator. I also would like to clean out the engine cooling passages as best I can with the engine in the car. Does anyone have any recommendations as to the best way to do this? I don't know that the typical flush kits really do a good job of getting the junk out of the nooks and crannies in the block.
Thank you all for your help.
Bill

Here is the write up and draeings for the mods. The bigest advantage of this modification is you can change the water pump belt in under an hour!

Interesting post. I plan following this.


Gary Parsons

Does anyone happen to have copies of the plans for the Al Goodman overdrive water pump pulley system? I have searched the ACD newsletters for the plans but not found them. I found a reference in the March 1962 newsletter saying the plans were in the October 1958 newsletter but unfortunately they do not seem to be there.
Thank you.
Bill Kastanis