[rotorwrench]

Flow dynamics is a part of engineering that I should have had a better education on instead of playing around with the damn helicopters but it is interesting to touch upon now and then. Ford's engineers had a long time to play with the dynamics of it and their changes ended with the 8BA series. They wanted cool water to flow through there at a rate that wouldn't choke up the radiator or gather too much heat (not too slow and not too fast). The more coolant you have in there, the slower the pumps will be able to move it. It's a balancing act to move coolant through both the engine and the radiator. Flatheads always had large radiators but having two pumps and two separate cooling systems with a common radiator made that a requirement.

A lot of cooling problems were due to too much casting sand and core wire being stuck inside the block after the casting process. They got as much out as their process would allow but some blocks really had it stuck in there. My hand me down 1951 Mercury was purchased by my Pop when it only had about 15K miles on it with no major trips to the shop. One of my uncles did a ring job on it in the late 50s around 1957. I did the next overhaul on it in the 80s. I took the block to a Redi-Strip shop and he put it in his tank. The tank had a screen to catch all the contaminants that came out. He took a large size coffee can full of sand and wire out of there. This motor never once had heating problems that I can recall other than bad water pump and hose replacements. We rodded the radiator in 1973 and it was still clean at overhaul. It runs real cool now.