[quote="oldandtired"][quote="roadkill2"]
In other words, if you have a 17" fan and it's a quarter inch away from the Radiator, you're only using a 17" circle in your radiator to cool your engine.
On the Flex Fan. It should work just fine for the symptoms you have described. A "Flex Fan" is designed to flatten out as the fan's rpm increases and to pull LESS air as it does.
x2
I had a flex fan on a 331 SBC and was racking the throttle from beside the roadster. The fan blades flexed foward and cut into the radiator. Thankfully I was sprayed with warm water, not hot!! :shock:
You had one with the long skinny rectangular blades, didn'tcha? Like I said, you get a lot more efficiency from a shrouded mechanical fan if it's back aways from the radiator. Basically, you get to use ALL of the radiator, not just the area the fan pulls air through directly in front of the fan.
I learned all this from my time at "Hard Knocks U" which was about 3 years of street rodding (About 20,000 miles) in a '34 Sedan with a blown SBC . . with a smaller than stock water pump pulley on it .(Unbeknownst to me) I even had a custom built Electric "S" fan from SPAL ($437) . . Bought a shroud from Walker, put on a cut down "Skinny Blade" Flex Fan (had to build a custom fan spacer) and have no more cooling problems . . But I could write a book . . about both the solution(s) and all the goofy and sometimes applicable advice I got from everyone from cooling engineers to little kids . .