<VV> battery vents

[airvair]

As I understand it, the Delron fan was tried out around '62, and the 
trip to which you refer happened when one engineer took a car so 
equipped from Detroit to Cleveland in the middle of the winter. Pretty 
much everything else you say is correct.

The CPF museum DOES have one of these fans in its collection in Ypsi, 
and the tale was published in the CC back a few years ago.

-Mark C

J R Read_HML wrote:

> I may not have the story exact on why the battery vents came about, 
> but it goes some thing like this.  GM had come up with a new lighter 
> weight fan made of essentially a plastic material that they called 
> Delron.  This was to take the place of those heavy steel fans that 
> were on the early cars.  About 1500 or so of the fans had been made 
> and many were installed on test vehicles.  I don't know if any of 
> these ever got onto regular production cars or not and I don't know 
> the exact time period when this took place, but maybe someone in VV 
> can comment on those items.
>
> Anyway, some of the testing took place in a cold climate.  Alaska? 
> Colorado?  I don't know for certain just where.  One of the cars had a 
> faulty regulator which was set a bit too high and was charging the 
> battery constantly.  They had taken a long drive in several cars and 
> the driver (tester) of the high charging car was sick and coughing and 
> watery eyes etc by the end of the day.
>
> After investigating the situation, it turned out that the acid fumes 
> being kicked off by the constantly charging battery had reacted with 
> the Delron fan resulting in formaldehyde fumes which got into the 
> heater and therefore into the passenger compartment.  GM scrapped the 
> Delron fan and came up with the magnesium one as the replacement. BTW, 
> those are kind of fun in a camp fire (don't do this at home and if you 
> do it anyway, DO NOT pour water on).
>
> There was of course still concern over the potential of a cooking 
> battery sending acid fumes to the passenger compartment, so the 
> battery vent tubes were born.  I'm not sure if they stayed all the way 
> to the end of production.  Someone with a '69 might be able to tell us 
> if the holes are there on their car.
>
> Anyone who has more specific knowledge on this than I, feel free to 
> correct any misstatements I may have made.
>
> Attachments (if any) are scanned with anti-virus software.
>
> Later, JR