Phil Matheson wrote: > Do you think the normal baffling system or the inclosed system similar to > Mark L's with a glass scoop over the cylinders and head works the best??
I haven't tried it both ways, but Troy Petteway did on his 2180VW engine that he had before his present O-200. He said it cooled much better and allowed him to make his inlets smalller, reducing cooling drag and increasing speed slightly. Mine works OK but would work better if I'd done a better job of connecting the cowling inlets to the plenums. I intend to fix that with the next cowling, or I'll improve this one...one or the other. The correct way to do it is make the plenum extend a little further foward than I did, and them clamp the plenum inlet between the inlets on the upper and lower halves of the cowling. That way there are no leaks and any air that comes in the inlets is going to have to pass over a cooling fin to get out. One good thing about the baffling is that on a Corvair or VW you can use a stock cooler in the stock location (although for the VW you'd have to use a horizontal one from a Type 3 or something). This eliminates some hoses and potential failure points, and makes cooler installation easy, while freeing up some firewall space. One disadvantage to the plenum thing is it's a bit of a pain to remove the plugs and check them or compression, but I've got 160 hours on these plugs so far, but did check the compression once at about 50 hours. Still, it only takes about 10 minutes to get them both off, so it's not that big a deal, and I don't have to work around a bunch of baffling everytime I got do do something else on the engine. I like the plenums, personally. Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama see KR2S project N56ML at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford email to N56ML "at" hiwaay.net
