great white
Well-Known Member
Yup, everyone's got 'em. Fact of life for a road driven vehicle. Problem is, I hate 'em. Get enough of 'em and it begins to impact cooling capability. Chuck in the fact that our trucks make beaucoup heat and there's a lot of coolers stuffed in that little area behind the grill and things start getting pretty bad pretty fast.
I recently made an attempt at preventing more of the rock dings and bug carcasses by putting a wire mesh behind the OEM grill:
Yup, that'll help but I've still got lots of smushed over fins in there. Having been told I'm a bit of a "perfectionist", it drives me crazy knowing that mess is in there and working against my goals. Not to mention it isn't helping the cooling situation any.
So, time to do something about it. I grab a cheap pair of needle nose from the local buck store on the way home from work and hit 'em with the grinder to make a tool to straighten/smooth the severely crushed fins. That, plus a pick and I have what I need:
Some might toss out the words "rad comb", but they're mostly useless in my opinion. Definitely useless in this case with crushed, wrinkled and severely stressed/distorted fins.
The process is pretty mundane, so I'll just do a quick before an after pic.
Before:
After:
The before actually makes it look better than it really was. That pict is after I worked the core a bit with the pick. Some areas were crushed in so bad it was like someone fired a marble at it with a paintball gun. The area that the fins look "wrinkled" was one solid wall of aluminum before separating with the pick.
With careful a cautious work, they can all be massaged back into their original position and then the stretched metal shrunk back into shape with the rad pliers fin tool.
That's the AC condenser core so it takes the most damage. It also offers the most blockage because it's right up front. With any luck, the AC performance should increase a tad as well.
Now, only 5,698,348 more fins to go......
I recently made an attempt at preventing more of the rock dings and bug carcasses by putting a wire mesh behind the OEM grill:
Yup, that'll help but I've still got lots of smushed over fins in there. Having been told I'm a bit of a "perfectionist", it drives me crazy knowing that mess is in there and working against my goals. Not to mention it isn't helping the cooling situation any.
So, time to do something about it. I grab a cheap pair of needle nose from the local buck store on the way home from work and hit 'em with the grinder to make a tool to straighten/smooth the severely crushed fins. That, plus a pick and I have what I need:
Some might toss out the words "rad comb", but they're mostly useless in my opinion. Definitely useless in this case with crushed, wrinkled and severely stressed/distorted fins.
The process is pretty mundane, so I'll just do a quick before an after pic.
Before:
After:
The before actually makes it look better than it really was. That pict is after I worked the core a bit with the pick. Some areas were crushed in so bad it was like someone fired a marble at it with a paintball gun. The area that the fins look "wrinkled" was one solid wall of aluminum before separating with the pick.
With careful a cautious work, they can all be massaged back into their original position and then the stretched metal shrunk back into shape with the rad pliers fin tool.
That's the AC condenser core so it takes the most damage. It also offers the most blockage because it's right up front. With any luck, the AC performance should increase a tad as well.
Now, only 5,698,348 more fins to go......
