I finally got a chance to have a good look at the aluminium radiator that was made up , it's actually slightly smaller than the standard M5 radiator so there won't be much of a cooling performance improvement other than the material used but the aluminium necks are a huge improvement.
We'll see on the cooling once it's installed.
This is a prototype radiator which will be going into GA25331 (Taffy's white M5), it's external dimensions are identical to a standard M5 radiator and once it's in we can see where we can push the boundaries now we know the limitations of the local fabricator.
Standard M5 radiator
Cooling core area : 600mm x 438mm = 262,800 mm2
Cooling core volume : 600 x 438 x 40mm = 10,512,000 mm3
Weight : 5.419 kg (did you know the weight of the radiator is stamped on the base plate ?) I weighed it at 5.5 kg on my not so mechanical accurate scales.
Coolant capacity : 3 litres
Fabricated radiator
Cooling core area : 570mm x 445mm = 253,650 mm2
Cooling core volume : 570mm x 445mm x 35mm = 8,877,750 mm3
Weight : 4.5 kg
Coolant capacity : 3 litres (bigger volume in the radiator side tanks)
On paper the aluminium radiator looks like it will underperform compared to the standard radiator , it will be interesting to see if the different materials makes up the difference.
The main reason Taffy had this made up was to increase reliability on the radiator hose necks.
Fabricated expansion tank
The aluminium expansion tank is excellent , it's the same weight as the standard plastic expansion tank (1kg) and holds 2 litres (1 litre for the standard), the expansion tank and the radiator combined as a package should show an improvement.
The next batch we'll incorporate a coolant level window.
An additional litre of coolant will be useful and again we can go bigger.