Speedway Motors Aluminum Hidden Expansion Tank Installation - Tech Talk
Speedway Motors created a new hidden overflow reservoir for coolant or oil. This fits inside the fender and mounts to the vertical wall. It can also be mounted on the front of the core support behind the grill. It's easy to install and the reservoir is well hidden once installed. In this video, Joe and Josh add this under the fender on our 1972 Chevelle.
When the installation is complete, the expansion tank is well hidden behind the fender and allows you to catch excess coolant when you need to.
Video Transcript
Joe: “Hey everyone welcome to Speedway Motors Tech Talk. I'm Joe and today Josh is here to talk to us about a new product”
Josh: “This is our new hidden overflow reservoir, coolant reservoir primarily, but you can use it for oil as well. When we were working on Project Chevelle we found the need for a reservoir that we could kind of tuck away and hide a little better and looking at all these GM cars in the 1960's and 1970’s they've got that nice crown on the top of the fender and it's really kind of dead unused space. So this will tuck right up inside your fender ahead of your inner wheel well and mount to that vertical wall on the inside of the fender. It’s pretty easy mounting and we're going to see from the side profile is just the lower hose connection. Our upper tube runs all the way up into the top here is an overflow if it gets too full and then you can drain that out if you need to. It holds about a quart. We're going to throw it on here and get back to having a coolant catch can, so we can reclaim some of that coolant if we need to.”
Joe: “So this comes with little 90-degree brackets if you want to mount it flat on the core support or something but to mount it this way you're just going to use two of those bolts and then the nut captures the bolt and holds the thing up against the side of the fender.”
Josh: “Right and really any width of two holes up to this wide here which is six inches is appropriate because you can just slide them in and still have your two holes lined up.”
Joe: “It's cool because it's a carriage bolt so it holds itself you don't have to sneak the wrench up inside the fender the carriage bolt is held from turning by the slot. That's pretty slick.”
Josh: “So whatever width we want here, we can drill two holes. We will mock her up here and see where we need to get our holes drilled.”
Joe: “We’re angling this because the more angle you put on it the more capacity it has.”
Josh: “This overflow tube here runs up into the top edge here and if you put it flat, it's going to have a little less capacity compared to if you angle it up and get the fluid level up this high. I think it certainly suits the style of build on a lot of cars more than chrome overflows or a plastic original style bottle. If you have a halfway restored car and then all of a sudden you're putting a modern LS or Ford Coyote motor in it or something, you know it doesn't really suit the auto cross or race car type of look.”
Joe: “You could use this for oil too talking about an auto cross car. If you've got something where it's pumping oil you could use this as a catch can for the oil rather than pumping it all over the motor or all over tires or whatever.
Josh: “Another good spot to hide it would be on the front of the core support behind your grill.”
Joe: “Having the carriage bolt on there, it's going to want to slide and you're going to have to finagle it. Probably the easiest way is to put the carriage bolt through, put the nut on, and then kind of hook it on the rail on the side of the tank.”
Josh: “Yeah I just held the bolt through the hole that we've drilled here and then I moved the tank up on there and slid the head of the carriage bolt through the rail without having to have the bolts stay in place on the rail the whole time.”
Joe: “Now it's mounted in there and you can just barely see it and with the battery you'll never even see that it's there.”
Josh: “I've got a 3/8 barbed push on our radiator outlet here and a quarter on the overflow tank. So we've got a 3/8 hose we'll just suck it down a little bit on our overflow and be good to go. I can think of a lot of different cars that have this kind of shape up in here with this extra cavity. It's hard to list all the applications this would work for.
Joe: “I mean really anything 1960’s and 1970's that have fenders and inner fender wells like this, like Camaros.”
Josh: “It's just a lot of blank space not being used usually.”
Joe: “Wow that thing really disappears. If you painted that black, you'd never even see that corner. As it is, there's a catch can there and you never know it.
Josh: “If you even painted it body color if you had the time, working ahead of schedule or something like that, they would completely disappear in there.”
Joe: “Alright well that's pretty cool product, Josh thanks for showing it to us and thanks to everybody for watching.”
