1914 Chandler Light Weight Six- Over heating

[29 Chandler]

I have done a lot to this engine in the past year and now that it is all back together I expected it to not over heat any more. Apparently I have missed something. At idle the engine runs smooth and cool, about 155 F measured at the top of the radiator once warmed up. At the bottom of the radiator the temp drops 10-15 F.  At fast idle in the garage or driving up a slight hill after about 5-10 minutes it blows water out the radiator overflow tube.

 

I have a new radiator that is working correctly. I can clearly see water flow at the top of the radiator from the water pump so I know it's not a flow issue. Fan is running and creating a good draw through the radiator core.

 

Timing on the magneto (Bosch DU6) was set to specifications; fully retarted where the points just open on cylinder #1. After initial drive I decided it needed some advance like it had before I did all the recent work. After advancing the Mag It now starts better and has more power. After sitting idle for a week it starts right up like a modern car.

 

I don't see the problem as a cooling system problem now after replacing the radiator and ensuring there is good flow.

 

Could it be timing?  Should I continue to dial in more advance to see if this cures the problem?

 

The carburetor is a Carter BB-1 that came with the car and has likely been on there for 30 years. Idle mixture screw is out 1.5 turns as per literature.

 

I have checked before for an exhaust gas leak in the coolant and found no signs of that. Since there is no head gasket the only way water would be getting into the cylinders would be through the water jacket and I see no signs of that. Oil is clean and clear as well.

 

I must be missing something....

Edited August 3 by 29 Chandler (see edit history)

[Lozierman]

Chris, I can't offer any advice on this problem.  However, I can say the motor looks great!  You've done a fantastic job in getting everything to look so good.

[Oldtech]

It looks really nice. How full are you filling the rad? just barely above the tubes is correct.  Fill it full and it will blow out. 

I assume it has a water pump, and From Buick experience the pump may be too agressive.  You may need a restrictor plate?   

Just pulling ideas out of my head. 

[29 Chandler]

10 minutes ago, Oldtech said:

It looks really nice. How full are you filling the rad? just barely above the tubes is correct.  Fill it full and it will blow out. 

I assume it has a water pump, and From Buick experience the pump may be too agressive.  You may need a restrictor plate?   

Just pulling ideas out of my head. 

Yes filling the radiator up just over the core which leaves about 1.5” to the top of the tank. 
 

At the moment there is just a Gano filter in the upper hose.

 

thanks for the comments

[Bloo]

  

5 hours ago, 29 Chandler said:

 

Could it be timing?  Should I continue to dial in more advance to see if this cures the problem?

 

My gut feeling is you are going to want a bunch of advance after it is running, and especially when underway and under a light load. Is there any documentation about how it is supposed to be driven? Not all cars with an advance lever work the same. Some have automatic advance of one sort or another, and the driver still controls part of it. This being brass era, I suspect it has nothing and the driver does it all.

 

Gas engines all have the same sort of advance needs, though the numbers vary. Lets take something more modern as an example to give us a hint. On a generic 1940s-1960s car with both centrifugal advance and vacuum advance, the centrifugal advance gives you enough advance for running wide open with the engine making as much power as it can, full throttle up a hill. When the engine is not so heavily loaded, the vacuum advance provides additional advance. A lightly loaded engine has less air/fuel under compression in the cylinders. It's less dense and it burns slower. That's why more advance is desirable on a lightly loaded engine.

 

If you light the fire earlier, the combustion is over earlier. The need is related to RPM and important for power up to a point, but you cant have it pinging or trying to kick back on itself from too much advance. Under light load the fire is slower, so you want to light it earlier for best efficiency. If ignition is late, the air/fuel is burning longer in the cylinder with the piston further down, exposing more of the water jacket to the fire and for longer. The main reason for wanting more advance is fuel economy and responsiveness when the engine isn't working that hard, but for the reason I just mentioned it also affects overheating.

 

In 1914, even with electric start, they would have expected you to maybe need the crank sometimes, so there has to be a way to retard it to at least TDC and more likely a little after TDC so it theoretically won't kick back while cranking. The "modern" engine in our example above is going to advance pretty rapidly with RPM from the centrifugal advance until it reaches a point where the rate of advance slows way down. You can ignore the second slow part because brass era engines don't spin fast enough to need it. The vacuum adds to that unless the engine is under a bunch of load.

 

I think most guys probably retard all the way to start, and then advance as soon as it starts to some value that just seems to work around town. Once in high gear, and especially out on the highway, run a bunch of advance (wherever the engine seems to like it but no more), and then retard somewhat when accelerating hard or pulling hills. In the absence of any instructions from Chandler, that is how I would approach it.

 

Edited August 3 by Bloo (see edit history)

[29 Chandler]

1 hour ago, Bloo said:

  

 

My gut feeling is you are going to want a bunch of advance after it is running, and especially when underway and under a light load. Is there any documentation about how it is supposed to be driven? Not all cars with an advance lever work the same. Some have automatic advance of one sort or another, and the driver still controls part of it. This being brass era, I suspect it has nothing and the driver does it all.

 

Gas engines all have the same sort of advance needs, though the numbers vary. Lets take something more modern as an example to give us a hint. On a generic 1940s-1960s car with both centrifugal advance and vacuum advance, the centrifugal advance gives you enough advance for running wide open with the engine making as much power as it can, full throttle up a hill. When the engine is not so heavily loaded, the vacuum advance provides additional advance. A lightly loaded engine has less air/fuel under compression in the cylinders. It's less dense and it burns slower. That's why more advance is desirable on a lightly loaded engine.

 

If you light the fire earlier, the combustion is over earlier. The need is related to RPM and  important for power up to a point, but you cant have it pinging or trying to kick back on itself from too much advance. Under light load the fire is slower, so you want to light it earlier for best efficiency. If ignition is late, the air/fuel is burning longer in the cylinder with the piston further down, exposing more of the water jacket to the fire and for longer. The main reason for wanting more advance is fuel economy and responsiveness when the engine isn't working that hard, but for the reason I just mentioned it also affects overheating.

 

In 1914, even with electric start, they would have expected you to maybe need the crank sometimes, so there has to be a way to retard it to at least TDC and more likely a little after TDC so it theoretically won't kick back while cranking. The "modern" engine in our example above is going to advance pretty rapidly with RPM from the centrifugal advance until it reaches a point where the rate of advance slows way down. You can ignore the second slow part because brass era engines don't spin fast enough to need it. The vacuum adds to that unless the engine is under a bunch of load.

 

I think most guys probably retard all the way to start, and then advance as soon as it starts to some value that just seems to work around town. Once in high gear, and especially out on the highway, run a bunch of advance (wherever the engine seems to like it but no more), and then retard somewhat when accelerating hard or pulling hills. In the absence of any instructions from Chandler, that is how I would approach it.

 

Thank you Bloo, just the kind of detail and direction I was hoping for. Appreciate you taking the time and energy to weight in on this topic. 👍

[KLF]

I had the same issue with my 14 Premier Z2. I believe it has a comparably sized 6 cyl engine, 416 cu.in, as your car. I too re-cored the rad, rebuilt the water-pump and even rebuilt the engine. I also was running a BB1 carb. I recently appear to have improved the cooling a lot.

The BB1 has to go. According to Jon (CarbKing) that carb is too small for anything over about 360 cu in or so. He recommended a couple of carbs that should work. The two I settled on trying to find were both Strombergs. One was an M3 and the other a O3.  I found both and settled on the O3. It has an idle mixture adjustment and a main jet adjustment. This carb came out in the early 20's and was used until the late 20's. It's all brass and sure looks better than the BB1. However they came with many different venturi sizes. John said to get the largest I could find. Mine is 1 5/16 venturi. It took a few carbs before I found this one. I immediately noticed a big increase in power and my temp dropped by 10f. It also bolted right up to my manifold and the linkage worked too. In addition I also advanced my spark timing at the mag. to what I think is about maximum. In order to get the carb. adjustment right I put in a modern oxy sensor temporarily in the exhaust pipe ahead of the muffler and bought a gauge to monitor my mixture setting. This worked well and I'm not worried about being too lean and burning valves. I also put in a temporary modern temp gauge. Actually 2 of them. One reads the temp at the bottom of the rad before the water pump and the other reads at the top water manifold before the hot water enters the rad. I discovered that I was only getting a 4 degree F drop from the top of the rad to the bottom. So I put a restrictor in the top hose and now I'm seeing a 8-9 degree drop. 

Long story short I couldn't go more than 5 miles last summer before I overheated. Today I did a 20 mile drive and the temp ranged from 170 to 180 when I was  pulling hard up hill.

Now, I live in Vancouver where our temps are in the 78-80 range right now. I don't know what the out come would be if I was in your California temperatures!

Hope this helps. You've got a wonderful car!

Ken

[29 Chandler]

9 hours ago, KLF said:

I had the same issue with my 14 Premier Z2. I believe it has a comparably sized 6 cyl engine, 416 cu.in, as your car. I too re-cored the rad, rebuilt the water-pump and even rebuilt the engine. I also was running a BB1 carb. I recently appear to have improved the cooling a lot.

The BB1 has to go. According to Jon (CarbKing) that carb is too small for anything over about 360 cu in or so. He recommended a couple of carbs that should work. The two I settled on trying to find were both Strombergs. One was an M3 and the other a O3.  I found both and settled on the O3. It has an idle mixture adjustment and a main jet adjustment. This carb came out in the early 20's and was used until the late 20's. It's all brass and sure looks better than the BB1. However they came with many different venturi sizes. John said to get the largest I could find. Mine is 1 5/16 venturi. It took a few carbs before I found this one. I immediately noticed a big increase in power and my temp dropped by 10f. It also bolted right up to my manifold and the linkage worked too. In addition I also advanced my spark timing at the mag. to what I think is about maximum. In order to get the carb. adjustment right I put in a modern oxy sensor temporarily in the exhaust pipe ahead of the muffler and bought a gauge to monitor my mixture setting. This worked well and I'm not worried about being too lean and burning valves. I also put in a temporary modern temp gauge. Actually 2 of them. One reads the temp at the bottom of the rad before the water pump and the other reads at the top water manifold before the hot water enters the rad. I discovered that I was only getting a 4 degree F drop from the top of the rad to the bottom. So I put a restrictor in the top hose and now I'm seeing a 8-9 degree drop. 

Long story short I couldn't go more than 5 miles last summer before I overheated. Today I did a 20 mile drive and the temp ranged from 170 to 180 when I was  pulling hard up hill.

Now, I live in Vancouver where our temps are in the 78-80 range right now. I don't know what the out come would be if I was in your California temperatures!

Hope this helps. You've got a wonderful car!

Ken

Hi Ken,

 

Very interesting story about your Premier. Lots of similarities between our two situations. You've got me a bit on CID, the Chandler Light Weight Six is only 268 cu. in so I think in my case the BB1 is more properly sized. I do have an adjustable needle to install on the BB1 that I planned to do next. I am very encouraged that you were able to drop the temperature by adjusting fuel mixiture.

 

I advanced the timing yesterday and still have no pinging. It does seem to be running a bit rougher though so I think I will move it back a bit. I ran the car at a high idle speed for 15 minutes constantly watching the temperature at the top of the radiator rise to the high 190s F and there were no issues. I then reached in to the car to lower the handle throttle lever to return the car back to idle and immediately noticed coolant rushing out the overflow tube onto the garage floor! My initial thought was the car overheated, but after think ing on it I have come up with the theory that it was not an overheat situation but an over capacity issue. I believe that when I dropped the RPMs the flow of water leaving the bottom of the radiator was no longer sufficient to keep up with the flow going into the top. The excess water then took the path of least resistance and exited out the overflow tube. Being a non-pressurized system there is nothing to prevent coolant from exiting the radiator.

 

If the car was overheating the coolant would have turned to steam and been forced out the overflow tube and continued to do so when I shut off the motor, it did not. So now I believe rather than a overheat issue I have an overflow issue. I will add a restrictor to the upper radiator hose to see if that solves my issue.

 

As far as temperatures during my test yesterday it was easily in the mid-90's in the garage and later reached 100 F outside. Unfortunately this is my reality and the conditions my car must survive. I've considered adding an overflow bottle somewhere, but I would want it to be as inconspicuous as possible.

 

BTW your Premier is truly outstanding, thanks for sharing the pictures.

[29 Chandler]

Adjusted the timing back a little more and ran the engine again at a high idle for twenty minutes.

Runs smoother

Temperature at the top of the radiator never exceeded 190 F

Did not blow out the over flow tube even after repeated attempts to suddenly drop the rpm's back to idle to force the "over capacity" issue of the radiator to keep up with the water pump.

 

I guess it's time to get some miles under her and test again.

[PWN]

Are you running straight water with rust inhibitor? That is what I am using, any anti freeze mix foams and runs over. I did set up an overflow tank for the short term, I'll send you a pic.

 

I have been using an infrared thermometer and the temps on the block near the spark plugs bases get around 220 max on a 95 degree day and the temps on the cylinder walls around 180 -190.

 

I haven't been measuring water temps, I do want to add a water temp gauge before I start driving,  but haven't figured out how to do it yet.

 

By the way the body is now on the frame!

 

[29 Chandler]

21 hours ago, PWN said:

Are you running straight water with rust inhibitor? That is what I am using, any anti freeze mix foams and runs over. I did set up an overflow tank for the short term, I'll send you a pic.

 

I have been using an infrared thermometer and the temps on the block near the spark plugs bases get around 220 max on a 95 degree day and the temps on the cylinder walls around 180 -190.

 

I haven't been measuring water temps, I do want to add a water temp gauge before I start driving,  but haven't figured out how to do it yet.

 

By the way the body is now on the frame!

 

Hi Peter,

 

Yes I am running straight "RO" water with No-Rosion added to it, here in our part of the country no reason for any antifreeze.

 

Congratulations on getting the body back on!

[29 Chandler]

Hoping not to jinx anything but on the hot summer day took the car out for a drive around town with the timing properly set and the points correctly gapped. No issues at all! She is running really good again.

[BobinVirginia]

Glad to hear that!