Fan shroud project

This is sort of a vestigial post about my now abandoned (?) effort at making a proper(ish) center mount fan shroud for the Spyder. I post it now because there is renewed interest in this project from other Spyder guys, and because the One Guy who supposedly had tooled up to manufacture these and sell them for $1,500 a throw has, after years of promises, not yet done so.*

Let’s begin with the gold standard. (links to video)

This is an Ibrahim Kuzu fan shroud. It’s an exact copy of a 547 shroud, fit to a Type 1 VW engine. I believe it costs $15,000. Here’s an original 4-Cam engine for comparison:

Obviously, very different engines. But: if you lift the clam on your faux Spyder and that shroud is there, everyone’s eyes are drawn away from the extra width of your engine at the carbs, the lack of cam covers, etc. They only see that iconic rounded A-shaped shroud and, at least for a minute or two, you got them.

Now, $15,000 for a VW Bug fan shroud is a tall fucking order, even for the most insane, OCD Spyder replica owners. You’re talking about tripling the price of the engine, for a thing that is still, and will always be, fake.

Another option is desired.

For many years, CB Performance has (occasionally) supplied a center-mount shroud for Type 1 engines.

It is self-evidently a bad substitute for the doghouse design, lacking the necessary air vanes to make it actually work to cool the engine, and it also doesn’t look much like the much thicker 547 variant.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Bic Green designed a thicker housing to fit over the CB housing, along with an alternator stand and very lifelike velocity ring on the back:

This item, priced at a cool $1,500 (one-tenth of the Kuzu shroud), was supposed to start shipping last August but, last I checked, was not yet doing so.

By then I had already bought what I thought was the thing to make it work. FJ Camper, a VW racer, developed a plastic insert for the centermount shroud with air vanes. He says it keeps his 7000 RPM Karman Ghia cool on the track.

 

I made a rough velocity ring out of a piece of discarded gas grill. That’s part of a steel side burner no one ever uses: about the right size but very, very rough….

With that, the CB housing and a bullet-shaped hubcap I figured I was within striking range.

Then, talking to Bic last year, I abandoned my DIY shroud concept. Discussing what it took to get where he was, he persuaded me that the effort was too much for my feeble newbie skill set. We talked some about that cool looking bullet nose thing inside the fan, and I told him I’d bought a wheel hub cover that looked the part and set it in there and he told me he’d tried eleventy-billion things before getting that part right, and everything was custom-designed and built, and how hard doing all this was.

I figured a $1,500 shroud that was ready to go could not be beat by me.

I also didn’t like my options for routing oil lines to the front of my car. There are structural metal things in the way which, if I bored through them, it would be bad.

After mulling it over for a few months (and making a nice 547-style breather/oil separator), I finally decided to live with the Raby shroud, which works. Maybe Spyder it up a bit. I took my hubcap and made a shaft to fix it to the fan bolt.

I started working out how to make my velocity ring fit. With the ducting for the oil cooler, there isn’t any reasonable way.

I could do it, maybe, by fabbing up my own fiberglass “air vane” to replace the hose/piping on the back of the shroud. Seems like a lot of effort for a very little benefit.

Meanwhile, the CB shrouds are allegedly back in stock, but Camper’s insert is not being made. Too expensive to manufacture, he says. This may change….

So there’s where we stand: No center mount shroud for you!

 

*I emailed him and will update when I hear back.

 

 

 

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