Fitting an electrical fan

The original fan on the RD28 is not in the center of the engine but more to the right (standing behind the engine) and fairly low.

If you look carefully you'll be able to see the fan very low and only sweeping the bottom right hand corner of the radiator.

Although the fan clears the dif housing, it only clears it by approximately 10mm. with the result that the fan makes contact with the diff housing as soon as you slow down for a stop street resulting in a weird sound as the body moves down at the front. Luckily it is a viscous fan so I didn't do any damage to the water pump. -Yes I didn't check that small detail.

Also only the upper half of the blade portion sweeps the radiator and the rest of the blade sweeps underneath the radiator making it very inefficient. I did not want to install an electric fan at all, but after a week or so I gave up and went to a "junk yard"/scrap yard. I bought the smallest and thinnest fan they had and installed it. Luckily when I had the radiator made I asked the radiator shop to put an insert on the left bottom tray of the radiator that will take a generic "fan switch" just in the event of having to resort to an electrical fan. The installation was very straight forward, I utilised the brackets on the electric fan, switched positive to negative so that the fan turns the other way thereby "pushing" the air instead of "sucking" the air. (The fan was originally between the engine and the radiator). I then proceeded in installing the fan between the grill and the radiator, thereby the fan is completely hidden and nobody can notice the fan from a distance.

Fitting a smaller fan to the water pump.

As mentioned above I purchased the smallest and thinnest electric fan possible. As the fan only "kicks" in when the temperature exceeds 82 degrees Celsius, and then have to turn for quite awhile before the radiator temperature is more than five degrees cooled (that is when the fan switches of again) I thought of installing a normal fan on the water pump, but with a smaller diameter, thereby circumventing the chance of hitting the diff housing. I went to the local spares shop and bought a F*rd generic fan with the coupling. I had to put the coupling in a lathe and widen the inside diameter to 29mm so it will fit over the water pump protrusion. I also had to drill holes to align it with the bolts on the water pump. The drilling of the holes can be made very easy. I had to cut the outside of the coupling to the same diameter of the original fan coupling. It was then just a matter of aligning the old and new coupling and drill the holes using the old coupling as a template. The big benefit of this fan is that it is not a viscous coupling fan with the result that a lot more blade is available in drawing air. The viscous fan has a very large inner core with the result that the blades are 16mm long, but the overall circumference of the fan is very large. This F*ord fan blades are 16mm as well, but with a very small core, thereby making better use of the blades even with a much smaller outside diameter. I experimented before with the original fan in place to see if the engine will overheat. The radiator is so effective that even after idling in excess of an hour, the engine's temperature never moved above normal. With only the electric fan it moves to slightly above normal and then falls to slightly below normal. With this fan installed I am hoping that the electric fan will last longer and will only kick in during extreme off-road work. The only drawback of this fan is the fact that it is not a viscous fan, but then the original Land Rover fans are all solid as well.

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