Requesting cooling/radiator/fan help for a slant six
Dan, If you ever lived in some good cold temps in IN in the winter
Michigan…Ontario…Colorado…yep, I think I know a little bit WTF I'm talking about when the subject is wintertime.
you would indeed have seen that the engines needed cardboard to get any sort of heat in them.
Nope. I drove seven different Slant-6 A-bodies through numerous winters that got down to numerous degrees below zero, and the heaters worked fine without need of any cardboard or other such riggings. I won't claim the heaters were as fast or as hot as those on newer cars, but they were adequately fast and adequately warm. The one exception is when we took the '62 out to the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter in Colorado to photograph Comet Hyakutake. It was about -25°F without including the wind chill. We left the engine idling so we could periodically bring in the camera and put it in front of the heater outlet to thaw the frozen-open shutter; it was up to that, but only got warm enough to help our toes and fingers with the engine sped up.
I've also had the misfortune to be driving Slant-6 A-bodies when they overheated...just like any other car with any other engine would, for the same reasons: faulty radiator, or extreme conditions (real hot day, running the A/C in a traffic jam). Slant-6 cars are not magically immune; the laws of thermodynamics apply equally to them as to any other car.
As for engine surface being large, well it just IS LOL. You are welcomed to measure and let us know, but it is pretty obvious.
Sorry, no. The world stubbornly refuses to work according to what you or I or some other guy might think is "obvious", because that word really just means "what I think I remember of what I think I understand of what I think I saw". That's why it's not helpful to make claims we can't back up with facts, i.e., science and data.
First you'd have to demonstrate that there's a significant difference between V8s and Slant-6s in the surface area of external engine walls that have coolant on the other side of them. Then you'd have to demonstrate an actual difference in heat loss through that path, because there are other factors at work. For example, "mud" (rust/dirt/crud) tends to gradually build up starting at the bottom of the coolant bath on the inside of that Slant-6 engine wall you say is so big and sheds so much heat. Eventually this mud can reach to (or above) the freeze plugs. Engines thus mudded up have overheating problems not because the heat path through the engine's exterior wall is impeded, but because the heat path from the cylinder to the coolant is impeded.
Until you've got that data, there's more than enough meat and potatoes to go around in a discussion of things that really, actually affect engine heating and cooling; we don't need to pull imaginary ones out of thin air.
