Posted by Caleb in Kansas [172.68.35.19] on Sunday, August 07, 2016 at 23:54:49 :
So I'm pretty much wrapped up with the suburban 2500 swap. Put a few miles on it testing things out and low and behold, the fan kissed the radiator. I was using rubber upper mounts and either i didn't pull it back far enough, or it vibrated and when i got the RPM's up, the little bumps in the fan blade touched...it was tight to begin with since the sub condensor is about twice the thickness of the Dodge and i think the CAC is also thicker. Anyway, i knew there was a chance of this and i added some straps to hold it back tight and no touchy now.
I'm going to use the 454 radiator for now since all the info says it works well, at least under low load or empty cruising. Honestly though, it looks pretty small and the inlet/outlet is substantially smaller so I'm not having much faith in it being enough when i put a trailer behind it. I'm looking at a 31"×19" dual pass all aluminum radiator with 2 rows of 1", the inlet is 1.5 and outlet is 1.75. Anyone have any experience with how well one like this would work? I'm assuming it's much larger than what would fit in front of a cummins in a ffpw or M37.
Keep in mind that my budget on the radiator is about $350. The one I'm looking at from speedway is 249 and they have a blem name brand for 199 that is slightly wider. I found several replacement ones for dodge but they were in the $800 range. I'm thinking about picking one of the speefway rads up and welding on the larger inlet/outlet to match the stock dodge size.
I'm running a similar el cheepo crossflow aluminum rad in my CJ in front of the 6.2 which is known for cooling issues. It barely reaches 180 idling around in low range on the trails around here where it would go right to 220 with the stock one that had cooled both the 360 and 350 motor before the diesel swap with no problems. I wonder if that improvement in cooling would be similar with the cummins swap.
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