Hey Droog
Glad to hear you're making progress. Not too many '54's up and running anymore. Your car is basically the same as mine, drivetrain-wise. I used to run the stock radiator with a 7lb cap. Because I run the stock gages and senders, I don't know how warm the cooling system gets, but the temp. needle usually stays on the E of the word TEMP in the stock gage. Probably in 2000, I moved up to a new radiator from US Radiators but haven't really noted a difference in cooling temp. I have sat in a 2 mile line of cars at the Syracuse Nationals a couple of years ago and the temp did climb to the letter M but dropped right back to E once we got moving. I don't use a shroud or anything special, just a 17" flex fan which gets noisy at higher rpms. The trans cooling is handled by the radiator alone. Probably the greatest move I made with the car was getting rid of the bias ply tires! What a white-knuckle ride that was!! The radial wide-whites not only look cool, but it's like driving a different car.
Here's a pic of my car taken at the Goodguys Hershey show, this year
Lee
