cold air intake or mesh hood ideas??

[snorth88]

Hello everyone,

I really like my 1997 Argo bigfoot it hauls pretty good now with all the mods...one thing that cuts into its performance is under hood heat.

Has anyone come up with any good ideas/mods that they would be willing to share to combat all that under hood heat , such as a cold air intake of sorts or mesh hoods.
I can run without the hood but leaves, tree branches etc are a problem.

Thanks for your replies

[trevorakm1]

I have a bigfoot and battled the heat issue until...... I got a couple of the little computer fans and made a frame the size of the fans out of aluminum angle iron. I mounted the frame/ fans to the exhaust box the tail pipe runs through and out the body. I mounted it at the muffler side and pulls air away and out the body. The fans are on a rotary switch along with the brake fan.
First on is the little extra heat fans and then turn again and the brake fan comes on also. This way I can use brake fan while moving and keep little fans on when sitting and still draw heat out. The computer fans are very low amperage also I think .75 amp.

[grease monkey]

I was out a few days ago and overheated my brakes so my solution was to run with the hood and firewall panel removed. Seemed to get the heat out of the engine compartment efficiently but unfortunately I was going through an area with a lot of tall grass and got more debris than I cared for going into the engine compartment. Normally i'm ok just using my hood fan but a bit of inexperienced driving got me in trouble with the brakes!

Building on what was said above, if extra fans aren't enough on the exhaust side, maybe add some to suck some air in on the intake side. Just remember that if you were to use fans to both bring air in and haul it out to make sure the fans are installed to keep the air flow going straight across the engine bay as designed from factory. If you create turbulence you may end up being worse off than you were before.

Just a side thought, I have been considering cutting a few holes in the dash area that I can close off in summer, but open up in the colder months and run a small fan to push the hot air into the driver compartment for a bit of heating.

[curtisbyrne]

i have a little computer fan to and i am going to mount it on the exhaust side to suck air out of the compartment to keep it cooler.