Little tidbit of info I learned about radiators today. Do you agree with it?

[bull]

I stopped by a resto shop today to look around (saw a nice AAR clone) and got to talking about radiators with the guy there. He told me the radiators with the inlet and outlet pipe on the same side (like the small block 26" rads) don't do as good a job of cooling as those with the pipes on opposite sides (like the BB 26" rads). Once I thought about it seemed to make sense to me assuming that if coolant follows a path of least resistance has no real need to flow to the side where there's no inlet or outlet pipe. There's no doubt going to be some incidental flow there but the bulk of the flow is going to go as quickly as it can from inlet to outlet and therefore only use about half of the radiator's cooling potential. Make sense to you? Anyone ever heard that before or am I just repeating a well-known fact?

[John_Kunkel]

The theory assumes that one side of the radiator core has the flow capacity to move all of the incoming coolant to the outlet; I would want to see evidence of that before determining that the other half is redundant.

IOW, if the flow rate is 5 gallons per minute and the side of the core with the pipes can only flow 3 gallons per minute max, the excess will flow across the other half of the core to equal the input/output flow.

[oldkimmer]

The theory assumes that one side of the radiator core has the flow capacity to move all of the incoming coolant to the outlet; I would want to see evidence of that before determining that the other half is redundant.

IOW, if the flow rate is 5 gallons per minute and the side of the core with the pipes can only flow 3 gallons per minute max, the excess will flow across the other half of the core to equal the input/output flow.

That is correct..............kim.......