Jump to content
SAU Community

Recommended Posts

I've done a little bit of looking in to clutch fans on the R32 after I found the VL Commodore N/A's fan was slightly smaller, blades slightly more aggressive, 7 blades vs the R32's 8 and the setup also had the fan blades sitting closer to the motor which only JUST clears the harmonic balancer.

The VL N/A Clutch fan and hub will bolt up and operate fine.

The aftermarket clutch hub to get is the one suited to the VL turbo & R31 Nissan Skyline. NOT the VL 3ltr N/A as it won't bolt up to your fan.

Davis Craig make it. Dayco make one to suit the N/A.

Shop around.

I've had prices range from $275 (Repco) to $140 (Sprint AutoParts).

---------

Any one with a little knowledge in to the field.

8 blade (less pitch) vs 7 blade (steeper pitch) would have on air flow/drag?

The VL N/A 7 blade that I currently have on the R32 now to get me by, makes a hell of a noise.

I assume its due to my bar & plate FMIC as I can constantly hear the fan engaging while cruising under 2700rpm. I hear it cycle in and out, it keeps cruise temps around 82-83degree's on a normal temp day & 84 on a hot day.

Hot traffic it will spike up to 90degree's and then as soon as the car accelerates the fan engages creating a lot of noise and dropping the temps to 84-85degree's really quick.

Link to comment
https://www.sau.com.au/forums/topic/67625-r32-gts-t-clutch-fan-heads-up/
Share on other sites

I've done a little research in to fan design.

Greater pitch = a greater movement of air.

Less blades = a greater movement of air.

I'll repeat.. :rofl:

The VL N/A fan has 7 blades and a steep pitch compared to the RB20DET's (Unsure if R33's run the same fan) 8 blade with a flatter blade pitch but is approximately 1cm larger in diamater (I will double check the measurement).

The VL N/A fan is as noisy as hell, the RB20DET's is still noisy just not as harsh.

My theory is.. :rofl:

The R32's ran aluminium radiators which are well known for their superior heat transfer ability. This = a higher efficiency radiator so Nissan designed a fan with more blades and a flatter pitch (for noise and fuel economy) to meet the airflow requirements of the car/motor combination. As obviously a higher efficient radiator won't require as much airflow to perform well.

The R31 & VLT run the same clutch hubs as the R32.

I am going to now find out how many blades a R31 & VLT fan has.

It will be interesting if they run 7 with the steeper pitched blade. :rofl:

The R31 & VLT run the same clutch hubs as the R32.

 

I am going to now find out how many blades a R31 & VLT fan has.

It will be interesting if they run 7 with the steeper pitched blade. :D

I've never come accross a VL with an 8 blade fan or the bigger clutch (like the R31/R32), and I've worked on a lot of them!

The holden manual doesnt make any mention of it either. AFAIK all VL's have the 7 blade (noisy!) fan.

Did a bit of looking around at u-pull it recently and almost all the rwd nissans there used the 8 blade fan with the same clutch as what i've seen in r31/r32's.

Natho.

Every VL/VLT I have seen (inc. yours) ;) runs a 7 blade.

I had a look around for factory thermo fans today.

It looks like the EL Falcon are near the exact same size as the R32 radiator and should bolt up with no problems. Second hand, I couldn't find any. They are $195 new.

I came across a U12 Nissan Pintara/Ford Corsair FWD twin thermofan & shroud that looks like it too will bolt up to the R32 radiator. I will have to double check its depth.

The design and pitch of the blades look very much like that of the VL 7blade fan. I wonder how noisy it will be. :D

I am seriously considering the move to a decent factory designed twin thermo setup.

Half arsed davis craig thermo's don't appear to work too well, well they didn't for me. :D

i dont think there is anything "wrong" with the davies craig thermos, more that for it to work the thermos need to be held a little out from the radiator and in a shroud.

i had some AU ones on the VL for a while and it did heat up a bit (never over half which is around 90) but the radiator was blocked and i've never put them back on since i had it fixed; i just bought a new clutch and left it.

reason is that the AU thermos are so big they cover the whole radiator, not just the core, and it sticks out so much that the cooler piping im about to put on wouldnt fit (normally its between the ps pump pulley and the radiator tank with plenty of room).

i talked to someone who had EL thermos on their R31 (which looks to me like same radiator as R32?) and they said they worked great. i think its worth a shot.

There is a noticable design difference between the fan blade design of all the factory designed thermo fans vs the davis craig thermo's.

The davis thermo's (unsure about the bigger 15"+) appear to have a flat piece of plastic mounted at an angle as the blade. Factory designed thermo's have larger blade, less of them and are designed very similiar to that of the traditional crank driven fan.

But you are right. Fans don't work unless they are setup using a shroud.

When I pulled my 2 x 12" davis thermo's off my radiator it worked out to be something like only 33% surface area where air was being sucked through.

The R32 is fairly limited to thermo's as there is very limited room between the radiator core and the a/c compressor & its pipes.

The R31 rad is slightly taller than the r32 rad. but apparently fits no problems.

  • 2 months later...

hi, the fans on the r32 and r31 are quite different, well on my cars they are. the one on the 31 has straight blades where the 32's are curved ones- not sure on number of blades. i bought a new plastic fan for my r31 about 3 yrs ago and I thinks itwas about $40-50 from nissan.

  • 1 year later...

Does anyone know if the above is true for r32 GTR's particularly the parts regarding the viscous fan as that seems to be the killer Nissan want nearly $500 for the viscous clutch surely a Vl is similar/sameish usable

has anyone tried bolting a 32 fan to a vl viscous clutch or vise versa?

Sorry for butting in,the clutch on the fan in my r32gts25 (rb25de) has just gone. Being the first version of the rb25de i was wondering if there will be any differences or problems with fitting a clutch..? But by what i have read it seems a vl one should be sweet,but if anyone could shed some light that would be great..

Thanks.

Edited by worwor2

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now


  • Similar Content

  • Latest Posts

    • See if you can thermal epoxy a heatsink or two onto it?
    • The other problem was one of those "oh shit we are going to die moments". Basically the high spec Q50s have a full electric steering rack, and the povo ones had a regular hydraulic rack with an electric pump.  So couple of laps into session 5 as I came into turn 2 (big run off now, happily), the dash turned into a christmas tree and the steering became super heavy and I went well off. I assumed it was a tyre failure so limped to the pits, but everything was OK. But....the master warning light was still on so I checked the DTCs and saw – C13E6 “Heat Protection”. Yes, that bloody steering rack computer sitting where the oil cooler should be has its own sensors and error logic, and decided I was using the steering wheel too much. I really appreciated the helpful information in the manual (my bold) POSSIBLE CAUSE • Continuing the overloading steering (Sports driving in the circuit etc,) “DATA MONITOR” >> “C/M TEMPERATURE”. The rise of steering force motor internal temperature caused the protection function to operate. This is not a system malfunction. INSPECTION END So, basically the electric motor in the steering rack got to 150c, and it decided to shut down without warning for my safety. Didn't feel safe. Short term I'll see if I can duct some air to that motor (the engine bay is sealed pretty tight). Long term, depending on how often this happens, I'll look into swapping the povo spec electric/hydraulic rack in. While the rack should be fine the power supply to the pump will be a pain and might be best to deal with it when I add a PDM.
    • And finally, 2 problems I really need to sort.  Firstly as Matt said the auto trans is not happy as it gets hot - I couldn't log the temps but the gauge showed 90o. On the first day I took it out back in Feb, because the coolant was getting hot I never got to any auto trans issues; but on this day by late session 3 and then really clearly in 4 and 5 as it got hotter it just would not shift up. You can hear the issue really clearly at 12:55 and 16:20 on the vid. So the good news is, literally this week Ecutek finally released tuning for the jatco 7 speed. I'll have a chat to Racebox and see what they can do electrically to keep it cooler and to get the gears, if anything. That will likely take some R&D and can only really happen on track as it never gets even warm with road use. I've also picked up some eye wateringly expensive Redline D6 ATF to try, it had the highest viscosity I could find at 100o so we will see if that helps (just waiting for some oil pan gaskets so I can change it properly). If neither of those work I need to remove the coolant/trans interwarmer and the radiator cooler and go to an external cooler....somewhere.....(goodbye washer reservoir?), and if that fails give up on this mad idea and wait for Nissan to release the manual 400R
    • So, what else.... Power. I don't know what it is making because I haven't done a post tune dyno run yet; I will when I get a chance. It was 240rwkw dead stock. Conclusion from the day....it does not need a single kw more until I sort some other stuff. It comes on so hard that I could hear the twin N1 turbos on the R32 crying, and I just can't use what it has around a tight track with the current setup. Brakes. They are perfect. Hit them hard all day and they never felt like having an issue; you can see in the video we were making ground on much lighter cars on better tyres under brakes. They are standard (red sport) calipers, standard size discs in DBA5000 2 piece, Winmax pads and Motul RBF600 fluid, all from Matty at Racebrakes Sydney. Keeping in mind the car is more powerful than my R32 and weighs 1780, he clearly knows his shit. Suspension. This is one of the first areas I need to change. It has electronically controlled dampers from factory, but everything is just way too soft for track work even on the hardest setting (it is nice when hustling on country roads though). In particular it rolls into oversteer mid corner and pitches too much under hard braking so it becomes unstable eg in the turn 1 kink I need to brake early, turn through the kink then brake again so I don't pirouette like an AE86. I need to get some decent shocks with matched springs and sway bars ASAP, even if it is just a v1 setup until I work out a proper race/rally setup later. Tyres. I am running Yoko A052 in 235/45/18 all round, because that was what I could get in approximately the right height on wheels I had in the shed (Rays/Nismo 18x8 off the old Leaf actually!). As track tyres they are pretty poor; I note GTSBoy recently posted a porker comparo video including them where they were about the same as AD09.....that is nothing like a top line track tyre. I'll start getting that sorted but realistically I should get proper sized wheels first (likely 9.5 +38 front and 11 +55 at the rear, so a custom order, and I can't rotate them like the R32), then work out what the best tyre option is. BTW on that, Targa Tas had gone to road tyres instead of semi slicks now so that is a whole other world of choices to sort. Diff. This is the other thing that urgently needs to be addressed. It left massive 1s out of the fish hook all day, even when I was trying not too (you can also hear it reving on the video, and see the RPM rising too fast compared to speed in the data). It has an open diff that Infiniti optimistically called a B-LSD for "Brake Limited Slip Diff". It does good straight line standing start 11s but it is woeful on the track. Nismo seem to make a 2 way for it.
    • Also, I logged some data from the ECU for each session (mostly oil pressures and various temps, but also speed, revs etc, can't believe I forgot accelerator position). The Ecutek data loads nicely to datazap, I got good data from sessions 2, 3 and 4: https://datazap.me/u/duncanhandleyhgeconsultingcomau/250813-wakefield-session-2?log=0&data=7 https://datazap.me/u/duncanhandleyhgeconsultingcomau/250813-wakefield-session-3?log=0&data=6 https://datazap.me/u/duncanhandleyhgeconsultingcomau/250813-wakefield-session-4?log=0&data=6 Each session is cut into 3 files but loaded together, you can change between them in the top left. As the test sessions are mostly about the car, not me, I basically start by checking the oil pressure (good, or at least consistent all day). These have an electrically controlled oil pump which targets 25psi(!) at low load and 50 at high. I'm running a much thicker oil than recommended by nissan (they said 0w20, I'm running 10w40) so its a little higher. The main thing is that it doesn't drop too far, eg in the long left hand fish hook, or under brakes so I know I'm not getting oil surge. Good start. Then Oil and Coolant temp, plus intercooler and intake temps, like this: Keeping in mind ambient was about 5o at session 2, I'd say the oil temp is good. The coolant temp as OK but a big worry for hot days (it was getting to 110 back in Feb when it was 35o) so I need to keep addressing that. The water to air intercooler is working totally backwards where we get 5o air in the intake, squish/warm it in the turbos (unknown temp) then run it through the intercoolers which are say 65o max in this case, then the result is 20o air into the engine......the day was too atypical to draw a conclusion on that I think, in the united states of freedom they do a lot of upsizing the intercooler and heat exchanger cores to get those temps down but they were OK this time. The other interesting (but not concerning) part for me was the turbo speed vs boost graph: I circled an example from the main straight. With the tune boost peaks at around 18psi but it deliberately drops to about 14psi at redline because the turbos are tiny - they choke at high revs and just create more heat than power if you run them hard all the way. But you can also see the turbo speed at the same time; it raises from about 180,000rpm to 210,000rpm which the boost falls....imagine the turbine speed if they held 18psi to redline. The wastegates are electrically controlled so there is a heap of logic about boost target, actual boost, delta etc etc but it all seems to work well
×
×
  • Create New...