Heatercores - the insides w/pics.

it is hard to describe what goes on inside a heatercore without some good pics of one that is semi-torn apart so I decided to break out the torch, the dremel and the nikon and do just that.

if you take off the top or bottom tank of a heatercore, this is what you will see --

^the arrows point to the channels that water will flow thru. the solid sections in between the flow channels are the tops for the fins that run down the core to exchange heat from the water to the air.

if you cut those, you will find this underneath:

the red arrows on the left point to the waterflow channels, the blue arrows on the right point to the finned fins that are the ones in contact with the air.

pic of a core with one of the layers peeled back:


pic of the same peeled-back layer but this time I spread open one of the waterchannels that is next to it:

the arrow points to the opened up waterchannel.

the crimped sections + the fins on top of the fins = massive amount of surface area in a fairly compact package.

wow. that really is a- lot of surface area...tons more than your average heatsink.

what type of core was that?

looks like the fedco-302, or 77 bonniville. if not, it was similar and just a different size...from what i've seen most car heatercores are the same idea.

yeah - it was a b'ville that a friend got at a salvage yard -- it had some fatal flaws so it was chopped up. I have a 2-342 and some other that were DOA that I also pulled apart and they are all pretty much the same on the inside.

those pics also show why painting the outer edges of the fins does not hurt performance - as long as the paint doesn't get beyond the silver solder line on the outside edge of the fins, you are not effecting the fins that are doing all the cooling (i.e. the copper fins that are on the fins in the center of the core)