Irritated by not being able to see out my windshield during a cool humid morning or during wet weather, I’ve long been knocking around ideas to fix it. Finally, seeing what Jason Plante (Balanced Performance) rigged up at Road Atlanta last Dec, I though to myself, “ok, time to swap out my “rag on a stick” for a real defroster.”
Of course, my first stop was Home Depot. I bought some ABS pipe and pool hose. Then got on line and bought a blower fan and some AL adapters. Here’s the adapter.
I bought some of this hose because it’s quite flexy, but I didn’t end up using it. Good stuff for your helmet air tho. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073ZM7KG5/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
The HD pool hose was a little too large to fit tightly on the PVC pipe. So I took some parachute cord and wound it tightly around the last 2" of pipe. Then I coated the cord with rubber cement to keep it in place. That increased the dia of the pipe so the hose fit nicely.
I wargamed a number of locations for the blower, and didn’t really like any of them. I wanted to get it out of the way so future passengers wouldn’t kick it. But it also needed to be in a location that lent itself well to fasteners. Putting the blower on the transmission hump forward of the dash would mean that I’d have a helova time fastening it down. Finally I decided that I needed to do it the easy way and decided to put it on the cage’s A pillar. The blower is designed to be fastened on a flat surface so I had to dream up a way to fasten it to the cage bar.
The hose is a snug fit in the AL adapters. Put a little grease inside the AL adapter and the hose will twist in.
I went thru a lot of ideas re. a source of warm air. I looked over little heating elements, I thought about putting the hose up to the hole in my tranny tunnel that gives access to the tranny fill port, but finally I settled on using the engine bay as the source of warm air. I squeezed down the HD pool hose and then shoved it thru the firewall hole that is designed for the AC pipes. The hole is next to the rearward passenger side hood fastening assembly. Look close in this pic for the blue hose sticking up.
The pipe itself has a 90deg bend and a cap. It’s fastened thru the dash vents to the forward cage bar at both ends. I put cuts in the pipe with an angle grinder. When you consider where to make your cuts on the pipe and how big to make them, remember that the pipe will lose air pressure as the air gets farther from the blower. So put fewer cuts near the blower and a big long cut when you’re farther from the blower. Click on the picture so you can see all the cuts. The form software is cropping the pic in the reading view.
