SDPC Tech Tips: SBC Vortec Coolant Bypass

hello everybody nick here again at scott dickey we appreciate you stopping by for another one of our weekly tech videos there's no need to adjust your screen yes the small block to my right here is that filthy now don't worry this is actually just an old-school small block actually i believe it was in a later second gen camaro we actually learned it's one of the old 260 horse crate engines from scoggin nikki way back in the day this thing's super old it's going to be going through a rebuild and i might even do a video you guys for you guys showing how to paint one of these but for today i want to use it for an instructional purpose we're going to go back to the old school we're going to be showing you some of the small block stuff now i know you guys love watching you know new videos about ls and lt stuff because that's what people are wanting to learn the most but what we've been hearing from more shops not that they do restorations performance shops is a lot of people surprisingly are going back to small blocks because they're unique again i know that sounds strange this was the most common engine in the u.s for any type of performance application on the street well almost today and it's been around it's just since the 50s and been a hit ever since so it's kind of weird to hear like that's kind of like people are saying they like the beatles because it's unique well i know that sounds strange but we have heard of people that are actually getting back into these so we do want to keep up with some of the tech on this stuff a lot of the stuff has been information that's been around for years and that it's been around for so long it's kind of buried in the internet it's kind of hard to find so one of the things we want to discuss today is coolant bypass on small blocks if you're wondering what i'm talking about very simply take a look at where the water pump mounts here on the front of the block this third hole on the passenger side of the block on a 85 and older gen 1 style small block this is what we're talking about when you first firing up an engine in the morning and it's cold and the thermostat's closed that little hole bleeds back to the deck here on the passenger side cylinder head and it just keeps the coolant kind of flowing so it's not all back pressured up while the thermostat's still closed lets you drive it a little bit the other thing is if you do start driving it you can cavitate due to that pressure difference and cause cooling issues and that's actually one of the bigger things here on production vortech engines we are talking about the 96 half ton 5.7 liter engine you know the cylinder heads everybody talked about for years those engines those are the ones where they actually went away from this and i am talking about production engines in specific so if you grabbed a 96 or newer you know half ton truck or you know a 57 350 out of a van and you're looking to hot rod or swap it into an old vehicle you need to know this information if you don't do what i'm about to tell you properly you can actually overheat one of these engines very very quickly we have had a handful of customers unfortunately they learned the hard way they spent all the money to either rebuild what they had or they bought a stock replacement from us and they were all happy they threw on an edelbrock intake and that edelbrock or holley carburetor and they got it all fired up and just in a couple minutes idling it already started to overheat and unfortunately we've had some customers that lost their pocketbook on this one so please listen along as we try to explain what's going on here now like i said all production gen 1 small blocks that are two-piece remain sealed you know 85 and older mid 80s they all came with this hole here and so did the water pumps so you really have nothing to worry about but if you are using a production engine whether you pulled it from a junkyard you bought a stock replacement from us you do need to know that they do not have that bypass anymore and you can actually kind of learn that yourself if you look at the intake manifolds for instance i have a performer on here for this one because it's just standard old school small block heads but i do have a nice performer rpm here from edelbrock and as you can see there's a threaded port right in front of the thermostat housing and you might be thinking yeah i'm just going to put a plug in that i really don't know what's that for might be an extra heater hose connection right well not necessarily it is actually an external bypass so old school was internal vortec was external you actually put a little threaded hose bung on this and if you notice the vortech engines had another hose bung coming out of the top of the water pump and so it just converted it from an internal style in the block to an external style through that hose no big deal the problem is if you don't run that if you do try to block that off you can run into overeating issues and i will say you almost will run into overheating issues we really haven't heard of anybody that has done it successfully without doing this now there's a couple different things we've heard about people bypassing it while we have no experience in what i'm about to tell you i have heard from quite a few people searching online finding customers responses that seem to have good success i'll go ahead and tell you we have had people that have drilled holes in the thermostat it does the same thing it just does it all the way through the engine it seems that it works for a lot of people i would be cautious in trying it yourself make sure to keep a close eye on that temperature gauge if you try to do that now i've used a couple terms here specifically i keep saying production engines the production vortech engines well that is because chevrolet performance realized this might be an issue for some of you guys so if you are buying a 350 ho an sp 357 or 385 all of those crate engines use the one-piece remain seal newer vortex style block but they are modified they aren't exactly production blocks they do one have the oil pump uh push rod hole drilled that's a big deal for a lot of you guys the big one is they also have that port in there too the internal style old school bypass so you don't have to worry about it if you're watching this video you've already assembled your engine and now you're kind of scratching your head and you're wondering um i don't know if my stuff has that or not and i don't really want to go take it all apart i will let you know that it is okay to run that external coolant bypass from the intake manifold here to the front of your water pump even though you already have it in the block so doubling up on it doesn't hurt anything either so sometimes it might be better to be safe than sorry a couple dollars worth of coolant hose and fitting from your local auto parts store might save you three four five grand in a crate engine or even more so be careful with stuff like this so that way you get to enjoy your summer with your hot rod now we appreciate you guys stopping by for another one of our weekly tech videos we do these every week we want to cover a lot of topics to help out you guys whether we're dealing with new engine builds or some of the old school stuff even if it looks like i pulled it out of the bottom of a lake so thank you for stopping by and we'll see you next week for another one of our weekly tech videos you

Channel: Scoggin-Dickey Parts Center

Views: 45,781

Keywords: SBC, small block chevy, Vortec, 350, small block, SDPC, Scoggin-dickey parts center, scoggin, nick, techsual, healing, tech, tips, Edelbrock, Holley

Id: EMA2P6tvyPY

Length: 6min 53sec (413 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021