is there anything at all you can do to these cars to help keep the engine bay little cooler? like a hood scoop or maybe something like a fin to push air up towards the engine from under the car ( i really have no idea im jost throwing stuff out there) i just dont like how warm the engine bay gets.. this is my first mid engine car so im not used to my engine bay being as warm as it is. soon i have to make a 750 mile trip in this car and i notice how warm it gets from just 1 hour of driving. so any way thanks for your time

The best trick I've seen to cool the engine bay is put fans where the vents are in the factory setup and put a reversed scoop over them to keep the water out.

The easiest thing to do is remove the baffles on the backside of decklid vents. Just drill out the rivits or grind their heads off. Doing so will allow more air to flow through them.

How about wrapping the exhaust manifold (s) with 2000* Heat Tape just past the collector.

------------------
Mark
In the Great Northwest!

quote Originally posted by NW-Fiero: How about wrapping the exhaust manifold (s) with 2000* Heat Tape just past the collector.

I wrapped my manifolds and it seemed to make a difference, I can actually touch them without burning myself. For it to last though I think you need to get the sealer kit as well, my wrap got pretty crumbly after a year or so.

I agree - I used header wrap from Summit. Made a big difference on under hood heat. Better venting is also a good idea. I am planning on a scoop of some sort in the center of the decklid with maybe an electric fan....

i put the later side vents next to my center vent on my 84, and most of the heat still comes out the center in spite of having removed the battery to the front. putting a center vent onto the later models makes a lot of sense.
jon

------------------
I'm the original owner of a white ' 84 2M4 purchased Dec 10, 1983 from Pontiac. Always garaged, no rust, 4-wheel drifts are fun!

how about like a air dam that will force air up into the engine bay... kinda like under the camaros to push air up into the radiator. that could also shoot water dirt or mud up there too but its just a thought... ( i think of alot of random ideas like this.... most of wich dont work)

I think someone might have tried that before, but I can't remember for sure. You might be able to find it using the search, if you're lucky.

I think placement would be difficult, since the catalytic converter takes up the only real open space in front of the engine you might just end up blowing exhaust heat up into the bay.

My engine bay also gets quite warm, but I've driven it all through the summer here with no problems.

[This message has been edited by Xanth (edited 08-31-2008).]

personally i wouldnt do the fin because i live on a gravel road and believe me you cannot
stop gravel dust from getting to your car but pavement is a different story venting more
*clean* air is a betting idea that it would help first id wrap the headers i was contemplating
on that for a while and it sounds like it will work use some good stuff like fiberglass or kevlar
better yet buy the new manifolds from fierostore that are ceramic coated and then heat wrap them that will
definitely work. the vent trick is pretty cool too cause mine already has half of the rivets falling off and they
make a rattle when going down the road.
i havent got the money to do anything though because im gonna need all i got for my 4spd swap when
i get the car to my house. that one will have much of the top end parts that i like to go in my car

yea its a v6.. my first FI car haha im 18 an own 5 cars im leaving in a few weeks to go to wyotech ( they said i had to use my scholarship this year) yea iv never had a car run this warm before.... i have a 1982 ford ltd.. it was on powerblock once doing a burnout during the viewer videos lol it was ugly 4 door dark blue with black steel rims.... i have a 1985 cutlass 2door thats my show car for now.... 1980 4 door cutlass with pontiac 400. and a 1977 dodge colt 1.6l rattlercan flat black with a sweet hoodscoop.. and my newest car is my 1985 fiero gt auto

Having actually tested engine bay temperature... It's not as hot as many of you seem to think. When the car is moving, there is quite a bit of airflow back there. When it's not moving, it's not actually any worse than anything on the road today and cooler than more than a few of them.

With few exceptions, most front engine vehicles made in the last 30 years are actually pretty sealed up. It gets air in motion but almost nothing at all at rest. There is no effective convection at all out of most engine bays. Even with the later baffled grates, the Fiero bay is more open than nearly anything else built.

If you are going to mess with the exhaust... A ceramic coating is probably the best thing. Wraps have a nasty habit of causing damage to the exhaust due to holding water and other issues.

If you have the later style grates with slotted baffles under them, switch them out with the older ones that have screens. If you are going to remove the baffles on the newer grates, put some kind of screen under them to prevent leaves and other crap dropping thru them.

I personally wouldn't bother with fans. Allot of the problems people simply attribute to heat have other causes that they don't look at. Take ignition modules for example... A big problem with them is crappy grounding but few bother to fix that. They just blame the heat. Heat won't help but a bad ground, which is often done thru the mounting screws, is a sure killer that will eat one module after another if it's not dealt with.

------------------
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
(Jurassic Park)

The Ogre's Fiero Cave (It's also at the top of every forum page...)

Just kind of adding on to what Ogre said.

The BEST way to lower the underdecklid temperatures are to do the following:

1 - Ceramic coat your exhaust manifolds (or headers if you have them). Exaust coat the Y-Pipe (Fiero store sells an OEM one that's already coated), and exhaust coat the Header Pipe all the way up to the catalytic converter. This will also make your car more efficient in eliminating emissions. Most places have local shops that can do this. I would expect to spend about $600 bucks to have all four of those items ceramic coated.

2 - Install a 180 degree thermostat. This will lower the overall temperature of the engine itself by a few degrees

3 - Ensure that the "trunk fan" is working properly (if equipped). Most of them are garbage since they were in most cases, not only wired wrong, but have huge gaps in the piping. This will help cool the coil and alternator.


When all three of those items are taken care of, it should actually be pretty damned cool under there. The ambient underhood temperature shoudn't be much more than the outside temperature.

------------------
Todd,
2006 Pontiac Solstice
2004 Volkswagen Beetle Convt. (Wife's)
2002 Ford Crown Victoria LX
1987 Pontiac Fiero SE / V6
1981 EZ-GO Xi875-A "Miami Dolphins" Medical Cart
1973 Volkswagen Type-2 Transporter
1973 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme 350

quote Originally posted by fieroguru: The easiest thing to do is remove the baffles on the backside of decklid vents. Just drill out the rivits or grind their heads off. Doing so will allow more air to flow through them.

Wont that also let more garbage get thru and onto things like the battery? I actually thought of doing that myself but was concerned about the 'crud factor'.

my vents do have the screen under them already ( thats cool ) could my higher then average engine bay temp be that one of my heat shileds is off? its the rear firewall 1 with the tranny fluid dip stick going thru it.... i havnt had the chance to put it back on

Corvettes are far hotter than Fieros. Air ONLY comes in from bottom, no opening in front. Theres no where for it to exit in or around the hood. The ONLY place it escapes is the sides of the front fenders behind the tires. And thats too low to allow much since hot air rises. Theres even rubber seals around the wheel wells to keep air from moving in or out.

Cowl Induction Hood?

quote Originally posted by 82-T/A [At Work]: Install a 180 degree thermostat. This will lower the overall temperature of the engine itself by a few degrees

While this might help with engine bay temperatures it will also reduce your fuel mileage by several MPG. I would suggest this to be the last thing anyone should do and then only if a custom chip is used which addresses the lower operating temperature.

Though the following won't lower temps it will make the items addressed last longer: First -put 2" standoffs and longer bolts between your ign coil and it's mount and rotate the coil 180 deg. You will need to extend a few wires but in doing so you will get the coil much further away from that very hot EGR. Also put some self-stick thermo shielding on the EGR side of the heat shield for it. I'd add a few pop rivits to make sure the stuff dont come off later. You can see in pic how much more space there is between the coil and EGR




Next- Cover the exhaust side of your starter with the same stuff, it will make it last a lot longer.

me and merlot tried a cooling fan to blow hot air out on the GT when it was his. it created a vacuum pretty much and sucked up all sortsa road debris. now the car has francisT's headers wrapped in header wrap, and that fan has been removed. still pretty hot under there. might be the same as stock, never played with a stock fiero before.

------------------
1987 Fiero GT built by my brother, merlot566jka, 3500 LX9 from 06 Malibu, WOT-TECH.com 1280 grind stage 3 cam, LS6 valve springs, 1227730 ECM conversion, Darrel Morse solid aluminum cradle mounts, Truleo headers modified to fit the 3500, 36# inectors, 70mm 4.3 throttle body adapted to 3500 intake, ported heads, upper and lower intakes, lightly polished, tcemotorsports.com crank trigger wheel, CenterForce dual friction clutch, Flowtech Afterburner muffler, 2.5" piping, cat deleted, EGR deleted, SinisterPerformance tuning, C6 Corvette exhaust tips. projected to be 35 MPG with a guesstimate of 250 hp to the wheels

quote Originally posted by User00013170: Wont that also let more garbage get thru and onto things like the battery? I actually thought of doing that myself but was concerned about the 'crud factor'.

It can if you park it where crud can get on your car. It also will keep the crud from being stuck between the fins in the vent and the screens below. It is the very first thing I do to my fieros and have very little issue with stuff falling past the vents.

quote Originally posted by Francis T: Though the following won't lower temps it will make the items addressed last longer:

There's the rub as it were... Under hood temp is only part of the equation.

Allot of cars are missing one or more heat shields. They rotted out and fell off or they were left off by incompetent repair people. The heat/EMI shield in the DIS brick is often missing because some twit threw it out with the old ignition module. Exhaust shields are famous for simply falling off as the mounting points rotted away.

What do these shields do? They reflect/deflect the IR heat flooding off the exhaust mainly but wherever else they are they are blocking something from getting IR heat from something else. (When you run into a steel shield in a place like ignition systems it may also be there to block electronic interference. Loss of this kind of shield can cause a bunch of weird errors/problems.)

There's no reason you can't add some of these shields. I've tried to get folks to add one to reflect heat from the exhaust away from the clutch slaves as part of protecting that system from repeated problems. Constant heating can bake the seal in there. Many here add one to the starter.

The shields don't have to be pretty and they can be made from just about any scrap metal. Aluminum roof flashing works great and you can cut it with heavy scissors.

They aren't insulation as mush as a crude mirror. Since it's IR they are reflecting, they don't even need to be very shiny. A heat shield just 1/4 inch away from a heat source can deflect hundreds of degrees of heat away from sensitive parts like starters and ignition coils.

The only real considerations are that you're new shields are strong enough to last, stay in place, and that they don't rub stuff like wires or hoses.

And yes, moving some parts can help too. If you move the coil away from the exhaust, it's going to be cooled simply because of distance. If you double the distance, you quarter the IR hitting the part. (It's that whole square of the distance rule...) When you have a pretty large heat source and a small object it may not help much but combine that with a carefully placed heat shield and you can block an incredible amount of heat. Even if you can't move a part, like the distributor, reworking/replacing/adding a shield can still help. Remember... the shield only needs a small gap between it and another part to work.

Sometimes shield placement isn't obvious... Look for things like the deck lid that could be bouncing IR back down over a shield. If some cases you may be able to block that as well as direct IR. On the V6 EGR you may want a shield that goes up and then over the EGR a bit to intercept IR bounce. You probably don't need or want to cover the whole EGR. Avoid going over something like the coil if you can because you don't want to trap heat around it.

It's a little tricky to get the shield just right sometimes but just about any shield can help.


Exhaust wrap... I really recommend most people stay away from it. It's pretty difficult to apply evenly and it increases expansion and contraction range of the pipes. This stuff has caused allot of broken pipes. If you can't use a ceramic coating, then carefully placed heat shields will do allot of the same protection and not cause pipe failures. A pipe failure is always dangerous. At the very least it raises compartment temperatures tremendously. In way too many cases it blows on something delicate, like the alternator, fuel lines, or wiring harness that can fry and kill the car or even burn it down.

Forgot to add, when you relocate the coil, bend the shield so as to make sure you still the affects of the trunk fan on it. Inaddition; I also made a better heat shield for the clutch slave and put that thermo stuff on it too. Both of my Fiero's have deck lid scoops with thermostat controled fans pulling the hot air out. On the norm aspreated car it may be a bit of an over-kill, not so on the turbo car. Fans do take the worry out of heavy (not moving) trsffic on very hot day.

quote Originally posted by Francis T: Forgot to add, when you relocate the coil, bend the shield so as to make sure you still the affects of the trunk fan on it. Inaddition; I also made a better heat shield for the clutch slave and put that thermo stuff on it too. Both of my Fiero's have deck lid scoops with thermostat controled fans pulling the hot air out. On the norm aspreated car it may be a bit of an over-kill, not so on the turbo car. Fans do take the worry out of heavy (not moving) trsffic on very hot day.

Can you explain what the heat shield is? I'm not sure what you're talking about. Maybe a pic or a link? Thanks.

-Michael

------------------
"A guy know's he's in love when he loses interest in his car for a few days." -Tim Allen

He who dies with the most toys... still dies.


Check out my restoration!