A useful Engine Modification

[Bellerophon]

On the 2 litre Bristol car which was as good as engineers could produce at
the time, there is one problem which the advent of the motorways has brought to
light, that is high temperature air trapped under the bonnet. The answer to
this would be to put some vent holes in the bonnet forward of the fire wall,
however, this would spoil the look of the car.
Since I tend to do some long high speed runs in my 401 (100B2 engine) London
to Glasgow (400 miles) etc.
things use to become very hot in the engine dept. To counter this I fitted
an original Bristol oil cooler, not that good as it was constructed with 1/2"
dia round tube so the hot oil passed down the middle of the tube, but it was
original and did help but I needed to do one more thing. that was to stop the
hot air passing into the engine.
I managed to find at an autojumble a plastic moulding from a VW that was
about a foot long tube with two oval ends which fitted the oval intake hole on
the Volkes air filter perfectly. I cut this in half secured one end to the air
intake with a jubilee clip fitted a length of corrugated aluminium tube to
the round end which I took forward passing the radiator on the left side above
the oil cooler hoses. The other half of the moulding was fitted to the tube
and secured ahead of the radiator thus allowing cooler air to be drawn into
the engine.
This worked fine and was beneficial to the engine, however, one thing I was
not expecting was that there was a drop of 5 degrees in the water temperature
(85 instead of 90f) in view of this I thought it might be of interest to our
friends in Australia where the temp. is slightly hotter than damp old GB.

My regards,
Bellerophon, Chiltern Section