college is a good thing

heh.. ive been having cooling issues.. etc... but i had an aftermarket elec fan on the car instead of the stock one. gift from my brother, the PO... so i got a stock fan, and it took me a little while before i swapped it on, because i came to the conclusion i should just bypass the thermoswitch in the rad with a jumper wire in the plug... so as to avoid having to hack the factory plug off the fan.

today i was demonstrating some things on the engine to my landlord, a retired land sruveyor of 30 years, and a haolder of a BS in aeronautical engineering. when his kids (my friends) and i were growing up we called him the rocket scientist, because it was true, to an extent. and its literally true, he and i "engineered" a thirty foot long slingshot for giving bottle rockets a first stage launch before they ignited :- ) (we got some of those suckers over a mile high.. verified..)

SO Fletcher starts looking at the fan blade while its off.. and then tells me to cut the key on, briefly.. then off... so later, after i went ahead and changed the fan out.. we are looking at it, and he says to me its spinning the wrong way. the fan blades were curved in all three dimensions, they looked like a shallow channel of plastic, that had been placed on a table and then bent slightly to one side.. so anyhow, i reversed the polarity, which of course reversed the direction of air flow.. but instead of scattering the air out almost radially (meaning not in line with the axle of the motor, but perpendicularly to that.. blowing towards the hood, and the fenders, and the ground, not towards the engine...) as it HAD been doing while on the car, sucking air over the radiator.. it blew a much higher volume of air (eyeball instrumentation) straight out. SO, my brother got a fan that belongs on the front of a radiator, and just "reversed it" via polarity switch... but the air flow was DRASTICALLY if not reduced, altered to say the least...

any thoughts?? the "radial" air flow pattern i described would naturally be more scattered, and seem like less airflow than if it was all concentrated in my face.. so was the eyeball instrumentation most likely inaccurate, or what?

Oh, my landlord, when i realized this in actuality.. he just smiled at me and said "you know, spending five years, in college.. it does some good things..."

anyhow, stock fan back on == good thing i think. maybe this fan would have worked better if i could flip the blade, or put it on the front... but i think the stock fan may have a higher output, and DEFINITELY draws that output across a much larger footprint on the radiator than this one.