Hello and welcome back to our series on automotive tools and how to guides for the new weekend warrior auto mechanic. This isn’t meant for the professional, but rather the average Joe who is looking to get his hands a little dirty on the weekends. In the past, we have covered a lot of tools but in today’s article I’m going to cover what it is that your car’s cooling system is design for. If you’ve been following along with my articles you should have a basic understanding of how your engine works. It intakes air and fuel at a mixture of nearly 9,000lbs of air per 1lb of fuel by volume, and compresses them inside the combustion chamber. At that point, Spark travel through your ignition coil, through the distributor, down the plug where to where it jumps the gap in between the spark plug electrodes and combustion results.
The combustion of the air and fuel mixture inside your engine occurs at roughly 4500 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s the job of your cooling system to bring those temperatures down below the boiling point as quickly as possible or engine failure would occur very quickly. To do this, your engine’s water pump pushes water and coolant through the engine block and cylinder heads, out of hoses and into the radiator. The radiator acts like a large heat sink to draw heat out of the water and coolant before the now cool coolant and water mix recirculate through the engine again. When you are parking at a stop light, there is no cool air passing over your radiator, so all cars have a combination of one or two fans to cool the water and coolant mix when the vehicle isn’t moving.
Tags: all cars, auto mechanic, automotive, automotive tools, combustion chamber, combustion results, coolant, engine, engine failure, fuel mixture, heat sink, radiator, vehicle, water mix, weekend warrior
