Electric Fan?

Just curious if anyone has removed the fan clutch and replaced it with an electric fan to free up some hp/tq. I had to clean the engine bay over the weekend and noticed they are using a fan clutch, I honestly thought those were obsolete these days. Does any know how much CFM the stock fan moves? If anyone is running an electric fan which one did you go with? Thanks.

 

Well, learn something new everyday. I was just curious as when I replaced the fan clutch on my '89 5.0 I picked up right around 38hp and 22ft/lb. I know I'm comparing apples to oranges there and a 27 year difference in "technology".

 

Not sure. However while we were tuning it, as soon as it would get to temp and the fan clutch would kick in we would lose HP/TQ. Cool it down, HP/TQ would be back up, got to temp, HP/TQ would go back down. When I removed it I did notice it was a HD fan clutch, so that might have had something to do with it.

Thanks for the reading material.

 

Bringing this back from the dead, removing the clutch fan from BMW definitely helped. Curious if this would help low rpm hesitation.

 

There is a pretty good episode of engine masters on m/t on demand found on YouTube about this subject. They had some quite remarkable gains when switching out the clutch for an electric setup. I'll see if I can find the episode.

Found it.
https://youtu.be/ZXdLgaFXZzs

 

7ft lbs of torque and 14 hp at the numbers that engine is making ends up being only 1.7% loss in torque and 4% horsepower... on an old style clutch fan no less. That doesn't seem particularly remarkable, IMO. Given the reliability of a clutch fan over an aftermarket electrical fan conversion kit with all associated costs/headache....those losses seem acceptable to me.

 

Nothing against electric fans, I used it on my Bronco, didn't save or gain anything at least my a$$ dyno didn't notice anything. It made the engine less noisy but that's it.