You say aluminum, I say aluminium

As I sort of intimated last time, I was probably never going to be completely confident about the cooling system. So, I took the plunge and bought an ally radiator, exactly like the one I had in the Fury. Except cleaner. Here it is with the fan attached (with the aid of cable ties, yay!). The fan just fits which was lucky…

This is a so-called “Polo” radiator and is exactly slightly narrower than the radiator I had before, which I shall keep as a race spare. As such, I needed to make some different mountings for it. Again, just like the Fury. In preparation for fitting it, I lifted the car way off the ground onto my super-large axle stands. (Each of them has an SWL of 6 tonnes!) When there I took off the engine undertray—only a million little screws— and drained the coolant out of the water pump drain. (You have to know it’s there, it looks just like a mounting bolt.) Then I fitted the radiator as in the next photo.

You can see the bleed connector at the far side of the radiator. I was a little concerned that it was sticking up a bit and would bash into the bonnet. I fitted the bonnet to check and I needn’t have worried. You can also see the plate that extended the right hand mountings with. This way I can easily fit the aforementioned race space.

Then I refilled it all, having gone all round the hose connections checking that some dozy twit hadn’t missed out tightening up a couple of them. It turned out that he had. When I first fitted the CBR1000RR I had terrible trouble with filling the cooling system. Then I fitted a bleed from the top hose, as in the next photo, and it became a complete breeze. It seems to be the same in the J15, even though the radiator’s a long way from the engine. Essentially, all you do is fill up the header tank, open the bleed on the top of the radiator until coolant comes out and tighten the bleed. So far at least, that’s all that’s required.

With all that done I re-checked that the engine cooled properly and also that it was now continent. Successfully too.

And then I put it all back together again. One minor change was that I made a little hatch for the engine undertray that should allow me to drain the oil without actually removing the engine; again, as in the photo.

Finally, I put the car back on the ground. When I’m next in the garage I can start on the setup, I think.

One minor problem, though, is that I discovered while warming up the engine that if you open the throttles, the ECU turns the fan on regardless (I think) of the temperature. That seems unnecessary in a race car so I may well change it again, perhaps to using an adjustable fan switch at the rear of the car or even a manual switch; the latter is actually quite attractive… For now, though, it’ll do. The problem with fitting another fan switch in a hose is that I’d have to drain the coolant again, which means I’d have to take the undertray off again and I’m already getting fed up with that…