J BODY

With the size of the cooling system on the described truck I would find this very hard, if not impossible to happen. If your trans is able to "overpower" your cooling system, you have bigger probs than needing a cooler.

RustyJC

The cooling system, although very large, has very limited heat rejection capabilities when the truck is sitting still. It depends on airflow through the radiator to get rid of the heat. Therefore, the mods I suggested do 2 things:

1. Reduce the heat load being generated by the torque converter during stop-and-go driving that is transferred to the coolant. When towing a 13,500 lb 5th wheel, this heat load is very large.

2. Get as much airflow through the radiator as possible with the lower temperature aftermarket thermal fan clutch.

No, I didn't have any other cooling system problems. If you don't like the suggestion I made, you're perfectly free to ignore it, right? All I can say is that it solved my problem as well as several others on the V-10 forum who had the same problem and used it on their trucks.

Rusty

Mcmopar

TWhite,

What was your "real" job?? Where in Syracuse do you live?

Phil

roadranger

twhite's sig. says he has over 170K miles on the truck...

I've got a question- do you still have the crankcase vent bottle on the front of the engine??

If so, your radiator needs to be removed and chemically clean the fins which are plugged up with oil and crud from that puke bottle.


JMHO

J BODY

No I don't want to "ignore it" because one of two things is going to happen. You are either going to convince me of this problem, or I will hash out the info you brought before us and make my own determination. I also live in a "hell like" environment although you have the evils of humidity (it's really dry out here). It would have been interesting to see what the tranny temp was when this was occuring. Having had the tank off a v-10 rad before they have quite a bit of surface area on the heat exchanger. I realize the load was quite large, but I've seen construction trailers of that size out here and have never heard of a prob like that. I can't see building that much heat with out really leaning into the throttle in the described "stop and go" situation to build that much heat from the convertor. Just an observation from working on these things where we'll see ambient temps of 125+. Not alot of "heat exchange" happens at temps like that!


If you ever see a first gen CTD truck in the bone yard look under the bed side and see if it has one of these jewels. I scored this one for $25.00. We used to install them quite a bit out here, but they have long since been discontinued.

j-fox

Roadranger has it right.
If you still are using a factory overflow bottle it must likely has puked some oil onto the radiator and is restricting the air flow.
As far as the clutch fan kicking on, it is working , you just can't hear it in town.
Try putting the trans in neutral when you can, the trans will cool better. Don't use park, there is no fluid flow in park.
extra fans and coolers are a good thought too.

RustyJC

As I said, it was purely a stop-and-go problem while towing in Houston summers. The V-10 has a high heat rejection rate, especially when working to accelerate from stop lights (you don't dawdle around in Houston traffic.) Ditto the torque converter in the 47RE. Don't forget - the A/C is on all this time (gotta keep Momma happy!) All this is happening under the worst possible circumstances from the cooling system's standpoint - low average speeds means little ram cooling through the radiator or OEM oil-to-air trans cooler. So it wasn't just the 47RE overpowering the cooling system. Rather, it was a combination of circumstances that created the problem.

As I said, this problem wasn't unique to my truck. A number of participants in the old, defunct V-10 forum had the same problem under the same circumstances. As a mechanical engineer, I took the sledgehammer approach - reduce the heat load (trans cooler) while increasing heat rejection capacity (lower temp fan clutch). It worked. Was it an elegant solution - well, we can debate that all day. Did it solve the problem - yes. Each individual can take it for what it's worth - exactly what you paid to learn from my experience.

Here's another $500+ nugget for free - forget replacing the engine-driven cooling fan with a dual Flex-a-Lite puller fan setup to cure this problem. It doesn't work! The reason why should be the subject for another thread, should anyone be interested.

Rusty

twhite

Flex-a-Lite puller fan

I am interested. Why doesnt it work?

Thanks

Tim

RustyJC

The Flex-a-Lite fans pulled 50 amps. 50 amps x 12 volts = 600 watts. 1 BHP = 746 watts. Therefore, 600 watts = 0.81 BHP. Even if the electric fans were twice as efficient as the engine-driven fan (and they're not), they could not move enough air under these conditions to enable sufficient heat rejection from the radiator.

Rusty