A small lip at the bottom of the shroud will close off the gap between the shroud and the radiator to improve efficiency. The shroud itself will be made up of a flat sheet of aluminum that attaches to the stock shroud’s mounting points. Two electric fans will take the place of the mechanical fan, while a third acts as the A/C fan. To make the most of the scarce space, we decided to keep our fan shroud in the spirit of the XJ, simple but effective. With our 10-inch fans measuring 2.36 inches deep, we had just under two inches to work with. Less than four inches exists from the shroud mounting points to the front of the engine, to be exact. That leaves little room in the engine bay to mount fans. The XJ’s 4.0L inline-six engine is nearly three feet long from the bellhousing to the front of the crank, and it’s longitudinally mounted (front-to-back). But there’s a challenge specific to the XJ that makes building a fan shroud like this problematic: space. A well-designed shroud ensures that air is only pulled through the radiator and not from the hot engine bay. An even better solution would be to enclose those electric fans in a shroud that tightly hugs the back of the radiator. One solution is to ditch the mechanical engine fan and substitute electric fans that spin at a constant rate regardless of engine speed. The only way to move more air through the radiator with the stock fan is to increase the engine speed or road speed-both could be disastrous in an off-road situation. Low fan and road speeds, coupled with the extremely high load of crawling up a steep grade leads to rising coolant temps. When the XJ’s 4.0L engine is churning at a pace just above idle, the archaic engine fan is barely moving air through the radiator. Off-roading is also an exercise in low-speed driving and for the XJ’s outdated engine fan, it’s an exercise in futility. Overheating is an all-too-common occurrence for many Jeep XJ Cherokee owners. Suddenly, the challenge becomes cooling down your vehicle instead of making it to the end of the trail. A coolant temp gauge climbing into the red or a wisp of steam from under the hood is enough to take your focus off those obstacles and lock it on your dash. All it takes to break that stride is one misstep. Every throttle input and steering angle change is carefully calculated to overcome the obstacles in front of you. Constant Stride – Fan Shroud R&D, Part 1: Productionĭriving off the beaten path is a constant stride.
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