bee1971- You said -"you wont notice a difference on sled with 50/50 mix maybe at the most a couple of degrees".
First off, you said you wont and then you said a couple-which is it ? Is this based on your own testing or just assumtions ?
I tested this product which said it works with 50/50 " my bottle says that" for 4 hours using a Racepak to log the data as well as consulting other racers across the whole country. We would concor that it works very well.
Ill take my $7 bucks and save my engine rather than kill my liver !
The article below is very intersting reading by a well know racer that has tested this product
We're talking about keeping your cool, when you're using your snowmobile in a way that was not intended by the manufacturer. In this case, I'm specifically talking about drag racing on asphalt (of course this same problem applies to grass drag racing as well, but since I don't grass drag, I don't use it in any of my examples). One of your objectives in asphalt racing is to ensure that your machine can get through a burnout, staging, quarter mile pass, shutdown lane and return to the pit before the coolant in your machine boils out.
If you run a stock cooling system in your machine, this should not be a problem unless two conditions occur:
The engine is more than 120 degrees F when you stage it.
The shutdown and ride back to the pits takes more than a couple of minutes.
I've run my sled (1997 ski-doo Mach 1) for three years on the asphalt without having an overheating problem. Normally at my home track the total trip from burnout box to pit return is about 1 mile. I typically like to enter the burnout box with the coolant temperature at 90-100'F. At the quarter mile mark on the track the temperature will have increased by about 20' (10.5 seconds from start to the ¼ mile lights). It takes approximately 15 seconds to reach the end of the shutdown lane (another ¼ mile). By this time the water temperature has increased a total of 50-60' from when I entered the burnout box. Upon returning to the pit area (another ½ mile ride) the temperature is typically up 80-90' from when I started. Hot but not so hot as to boil the coolant. When the engine is 200' even though it's not a concern for the coolant system it does require more effort to cool and a hot engine just heat soaks everything else and makes cooling the system down take longer.
The volume of your coolant system is the controlling factor on how much rapidly the coolant temperature will rise. The coolers under your sled do dissipate heat but the rate of thermal transfer off the coolers into air is only a fraction of what it is when the coolers are being showered with snow (as would happen under intended riding conditions). Considering that the sled is only running for a few minutes, the coolers provide little measurable "cooling".
What do you do if you machine can't make it back to the pit area without over heating ??
You could substitute straight water for the water/glycol mix that comes in the sled from the mfg. Water has twice the thermal transfer properties of a 50/50 water/glycol mixture does. However, water alone provides no corrosion protection. I ran one season with straight water in my engine and when the engine was taken down during the off-season it was loaded with white powdery aluminum corrosion. Not good. So water alone is not the answer.
For the 2001 race season I made several modifications to my machine to shave some weight off of it. One of the modifications included removing the under-the-tunnel coolers and the stock water reservoir. These were replaced with a Crankshop water reservoir and a section of 1" x .035" wall thickness 6061 T6 aluminum tube that runs a loop under the gas tank cover, where the stock gas tank used to be. The cooling system now holds 3 liters of water. I made some calculations on what the water temperature should be using this setup. For some of the parameters I had to make some assumptions as it turned out, some of my assumptions were wrong. The first day out to the track with this setup, running just water proved that the volume of water was not sufficient to make the loop from burnout to pits without hitting a boiling condition. Using straight water and the stock pressure cap this setup was hitting 190-200 degrees at the end of the shutdown land and 230-240 degrees when I returned to the pit area. This was just enough temperature that the overflow tank was taking on about 4-8ozs of water each run. So the water was hot enough as I approached the pit area to overcome the pressure cap and allow the hot water to puke over into the overflow tank.
The new coolant line lay where the stock fuel tank once was. The total volume is now 3 quarts.
Click picture for larger image The circled areas show the water resevor and quick connect for the cool cart.
Click picture for larger image
Since the volume could not be modified without extensive redesign of the cooling system, I had two options:
Tow the sled back from the shutdown.
Find a chemical solution.
Towing the sled back now means that racing is a two-person activity. I normally do not have a support person with me for asphalt racing. This is on thing I like about the sport. You don't have to depend on bringing a crew of support people.
That leaves me with a chemical solution. There are several products on the market that claim to reduce water temperature. Now was the perfect time to try some of this snake oil to see if it really worked as claimed.
A quick trip down to my local Pep Boys auto shop turned up Redline Water Wetter ® on the chemical shelf. A bottle of Water Wetter was about $7.00 and it treats 4 gallons of water. The total volume of water in my coolcart and sled is about 8 gallons so two bottles of the magic elixir were in order.
If you visit the Redline Oil website you will find a very extensive technical paper on all the reasons why this stuff works.
I naturally read through it but remained skeptical. I decided that I would document my experience with this product to see how it compares with the manufacturers claim.
The next weekend the weather at the racetrack could not have been better for testing a cooling product. It was a peak of 92'F at 2:00 in the afternoon. Relative Air Density was a balmy 93. I made my first two time trails with straight water in my sled. By the time I had returned to the pit area the water temperature was 240'. Using the Racepak data recorder on my sled I was able to record the water temperature in .2-second increments form the time I left the starting line. The recording time is 25 seconds. That puts me at the end of the shutdown lane, with another ½ mile ride to get back to the pit.
In the following graph, there are three data lines:
Black is data recorded the previous season with the stock 5 liter capacity cooling system using just water
Red is data recorded on September 9, 2001 of the sled with a modified coolant system holding only 3 liters of water.
Blue is data recorded on September 9, 2001 of the sled with a modified coolant system holding only 3 liters of water with Redline Oil Water Wetter.
As you can see in the graph, for the recording period, the water wetter mixture reduced the coolant temperature by about 10% uniformly across the recording period. By the time I got the sled back to the pit area (after the 25 second recording period of the Racepak), the coolant temperatures were in the 205-215 range with no water in the overflow tank. This was down about 10% from the water only temperatures that I was experiencing.
Based on this, I would say that the Redline Water Wetter works as advertised and I will run it in my sled to help beat the heat.
