Windstar electric fan placement

Last summer, on a trip back from the coast with a car hauler and a 84 F250 IDI in tow, my fan clutch bit the dust. Was still able to keep my speed up on the hills, but she was definitely building heat in a hurry (luckily the hills weren't very big).

So usually when anything goes lips up on my truck, I take the opportunity to upgrade - and I'm also cheap. So the decision to try out an electric fan conversion was made. $35 at the local pick n' pull, and I had my new fans.

I've seen quite a few people use these fans; the 2 mounting variations I've seen were just bolting the fans up to the radiator as is, or grafting them into the stock fan shroud. I figured it would work best to just make a new fan shroud specifically for the fans. So I priced out aluminum sheet ($$$), then some galvanized sheet metal ($$), then went on the hunt through the scrap metal yard. Then I was digging through this big steel cabinet in my garage where I store my power tools and....the big steel cabinet no longer has a back on it.

So this afternoon I got the sheet metal cut, bent, and welded; the sheetmetal I robbed turned out to be 23 gauge.


My question for everyone is, how should I situate the fans?
I'm going to butcher the Windstar shroud so that it bolts to the flat sheet metal
I figure the bigger of the 2 fans should be closest to the upper radiator hose, so should I just mount both of the fans straight across from each other like this...


Or angle the little one down towards the bottom of the radiator as I've seen on some of the aftermarket electric shroud setups like this...


Either way, I figure I'll go ahead and run them into the summer, and if I run into any issues with cooling at highway speeds, I'll add holes and some rubber flaps to let the wind blow through it better.

I like both ways. I really don't think there is a wrong way to mount them. Something I would do is make sure the new shroud is sealed tight against the radiator. No sense sucking air from around the shroud like the stock shrouds do. Do a search for Mels Article on how he fashioned his windstar fans.

i have also seen this confused by others before.the windstar dual fan assembly,is just that.an assembly.it's engineered to work at peak efficiency as is.adding a different style or trying to mount it in a mechanical fans shroud isn't going to make it work any better.without the proper equipment to test other custom shrouds etc,there is no way your going to get so lucky and raise it's efficiency rating.your odds are high however,to lower it.
it's extremely easy to mount to the radiator as is with just a little fabrication.there is only one problem i have with them.they are too powerful.i had to tone them down with a variable rate fan controller,as simply on high was overkill for the majority of their use.
log truck will likely get the same setup,but iv never run an idi with a properly working fan clutch.i wanna see what the power loss feels like for myself when the beast locks up pulling grades before making the swap.

So are you saying having a custom shroud will be less efficient than taking the stock Windstar assembly and bolting it up to the radiator?
I set the windstar setup against the radiator, width wise fits great, but I didn't like how the bottom 1/4 of the radiator was left uncovered.
This is what lead me to making the shroud.

you'll find that not only will you not need it,but what your doing is simply blocking off the airflow when the e-fans are off.so your final results will just be that the fans will need to be running more than they need to be.
you understand the fans don't need to be spinning while going down the road under no load right? provided you don't block off airflow,you'll only need them while sitting in traffic,using the a/c or when pulling grades wile hauling/towing.

Understood
That's why I mentioned the idea of creating some extra holes and rubber flaps that would blow open at speed, or suck shut when the fans create a vacuum inside the shroud.

You've got the right idea bike maker. when the fans are off they will still allow airflow through them, the restriction through them is minor. I've heard of others using the flaps too but in reality you might not need to go through all the trouble - might not even be worth it.

I'll try running without the flaps first. Back when the fan clutch was functional, the only time the temp would even get to 200 was pulling a long hill with the 5er in tow, and under those circumstances I would probably turn the fans on at the bottom of the hill anyway.

Just out of curiosity, what year range of the Windstar would one want to find for these fans? Not doing this myself any time soon, but maybe for down the road...

Mine came from a 96.
94-98 have 8 blade fans.
99-03 have 6, larger blades.
Otherwise, the motors and shroud I believe to be the same; never could get a definitive answer if 1 was more efficient than the other.
They're cheap at the jy, or Dorman makes brand new replacements for a little over $100.

Didn't get much feedback about the placement of the fans, so I made the decision and moved forward with the project.

Mounted them side by side; mostly due to the fact that I have a big PSD intercooler mounted in front of the radiator, which blocks all but the top 6" of radiator. Due to this, and the fact that the top of the radiator is going to be hotter than the bottom, I figured they would be more efficient mounted closer to the top.

So, I hacked the hell out of the Windstar shroud, and used it as a template to cut the hole in the new shroud. Bolted the 2 together, using a good amount of adhesive to glue the 2 together and seal everything off.

Made some mounting brackets out of aluminum that will bolt directly to the big tabs on my Champion radiator.

Slit some vacuum line and put it on the edge of sheetmetal where it will contact the radiator; I plan to stick some adhesive backed foam on the radiator where the vacuum line sits against it just to make sure the air has to go through the fans and not around the side of the shroud.

Enough talk; picture time.

Here's what the engine side of the setup looks like;



Here's the radiator side;



And here's a shot of one of the mounting brackets I referred to;



Tomorrow, I'll bolt the thing in place permanently, then maybe start attacking the wiring...

Damn fine....damn fine indeed, you could probably market the shroud as a kit and allow people to add their own fans/wiring setup...

JM2CW

You don't want to know how much time I spent messing with this thing...
Although much of that time was due to working with what I already had available; cut the back off of a cabinet for the sheetmetal, chopped rectangular tubing into angle for the brackets, etc.
But as usual, a second one would take 1/3 the time to make.
I did do a layout drawing of the shroud, which could be easily replicated by most any sheet metal shop.

That's impressive! Also apologies for not giving you an input on fans placement, I meant to but with an attention span of 30sec-3min tops life does get quite challenging Anyways, right now your fans are positioned where mine are, towards the top of the radiator. Difference is mine are flipped upside down with the smaller fan on the passenger side and larger on driver side, but that shouldn't make a difference in their performance. I've been thinking of lowering them down actually, as the top of the rad gets nice airflow rammed thru the grille, while the bottom is blocked by the bumper - the low-mount fans would help more air get moved thru the lower part of the rad where currently there is little flow, while the upper part can rely on ram-air effect. However, I do not have a full shroud like you do - in your case all the air is going to get pulled thru the fans anyways cause of the shroud, you don't have a free bypass area of your radiator like I do, therefore I don't think it would have mattered much whether you have your fans lower or higher.

I do have a question tho, and that has to do with the overall thickness of the assembly - my fan blades fly a hair's thickness away from the radiator fins and I still had to flip them over to avoid the long motor colliding with the York idler, you probably don't have such an idler taking up space there but instead your fan shroud appears pretty deep, looks like 2" or so? How much clearance will you have between the back of the long motor and the front of the engine then? Also Geonc has a writeup on how to replace the long motor with another flat one, here it is if you're interested:
http://www.oilburners.net/forums/showthread.php?17484-electric-fans-take-2

As for wiring, do you have the Windstar relay box? That made my work much easier, I still had to get a second fans harness so I can completely separate the fans power-wise but that's cause I wanted to do as little wires joining as possible. From the factory the fans are wired in parallel and so either both run on low or both run on high, however the motors are single speed (not like the Taurus 2-speed one) and low speed is achieved in a rather wasteful way by inserting a massive resistor between the power source and the fans. I dropped the whole low-speed idea altogether, instead each of my fans gets full voltage, but does so independently - I end up with what is essentially a 3-speed setup were low is big fan, med is small fan (it's small in diameter but spins faster and pulls more air, or so it feels), and high is both fans together. If you want automatic control this means 2 temperature sensors will be needed, I'm not to that point yet, I hawk the gauges and flip switches as needed. Tho I just got a crazy idea of using the factory "replace engine" light module on the back of the gauges cluster to turn on a fan for me instead of triggering said light... More on that once it's implemented and proven that it works good.

Looks like a nice clean install. I had a single Lincoln Mark VIII fan in my old IDI, two speed with relays. I know you might not want to spend the additional money, but I think the Delta Controller seems like the best way to control any electric fan, at least that's the way I'm gonna go on any future project. I think their solid state controllers start at like 80 bucks.

Very nice write up, good work, nice pics