Internet is back up, for a little while. Yes, Alex was the guy that I spoke with when I ordered mine also. I lost all my reference material when I made the BIG move out to the new place, so I can't be sure about anything anymore, can't trust my memory now a days. But...I think Shawn was the daughter that I talked with. I had several private messages with her about the inner workings of US Radiator and they got their, I'll just say, stuff together out there. This video is really informative:
Think part of that link is worth re-posting here Gus, since a lot of the replies back in 2010 were blanked out by the sites software conflicts with IE.
Hi Guys, "First time poster. My name is Shawn and I work at U.S. Radiator. I received a Google alert about this thread, so I thought I'd jump in and answer some of the questions here. Hope you don’t mind.
U.S. Radiator is a manufacturer that’s been around for about 40 years. We do make the "Desert Cooler" brand, though others use the name for offshore rads (more on that later). We are based in Los Angeles. Cool Craft is a distributor of U.S. Radiator just like Cap A Radiator, Chev's of the 40s and Jim Carters.
After reading this yesterday morning, I decided to head into the shop and do some comparisons and take some pictures for you. The original radiators used a honey-comb (hexagon) style core. The "tubes", which aren't really tubes; they are water passages, are formed by stacked pieces of copper that have been bunched up then coated with solder. These passages were on 9/16" centers. In the 50s Harrison developed the tube and fin style core out of the necessity to cool higher horsepower engines in a smaller space. They were 40% more efficient at transferring heat and the bonus to them was that they are considerably lighter; which means they were cheaper to manufacture. This is a picture of the honeycomb style core. You cannot see the water passages since they are surrounded by all of the bunched up copper; which we call “fins” now: http://www.usradiator.com/media/honeycomb.jpg
This is a picture of the tube and fin style core. You can see that the fin sits between the tubes and doesn't completely surround them. Also, they are soldered to the tube instead of to each other. These would account for the lighter weight. The fins are louvered unlike the honeycomb core. Air is allowed to flow through the fins, which makes is a more efficient core: http://www.usradiator.com/media/tubefin.jpg
I found two ’38 chevy truck radiators; one with an original core and one that we had re-cored using our “Standard Automotive” style core. The weight difference was around 9lbs. In the 10 years I’ve been working for U.S. Radiator, I’ve never seen one of our tanks split. This last year we received a complaint about one of our 55-57 Bel Air “Desert Cooler” radiators cracking near the ribs on the top tank. The guy took it to a radiator shop to have it silver soldered, but it would continue to crack. I couldn't understand why this was happening, but once I received the radiator, I quickly figured out why. The radiator was an off shore radiator sold by a company claiming to carry “Desert Cooler” radiators. Here is a picture of the radiator: http://www.usradiator.com/media/offshore.jpg
I constantly have to contact companies that are using the “desert cooler” name on these types of radiators. Heck, I even caught some of our distributors doing it, though I think it had more to do with them not updating the radiator descriptions on their web pages for the more popular radiators they can buy oversees now.
In the 60s, GM started using aluminum radiators on Corvettes that came with small block engines. Since aluminum does not transfer heat as well as copper, they continued to use copper/brass radiators with big block engines. It wasn’t until the Japanese developed what is referred to as a High Efficiency core design (tubes on 3/8” centers), that auto manufactures moved to aluminum radiators in all of their vehicles. The move was driven by the lower cost of manufacturing, not because aluminum is better than copper. We make a copper core with the same High Efficiency core design, which allows guys to swap in higher horsepower engines and keep the durability of a copper/brass radiator as well as original appearance. Walker Radiator has something similar as well. I recently posted a page that describes all the core styles we make: http://www.usradiator.com/cores
I hope that clears up some of the questions that were raised here about U.S. Radiator. I don’t have the time to check back here often enough, so if you need me, PM me. shawn"
