Hello Everybody,

I'm Willard Smid from the Netherlands and i'm since a week the owner of a '65 Valiant with a 170cu slant six. It's not my first American car, but it is my first 6 cylinder. This is the car:



Today i've been busy with the cooling system. Because of corrosion the thermostat housing needs to be replaced. When i removed it, i pulled these two things out of the cooling section of the block;




I can't imagine something like this should be in the block, but probably you can tell me much more.

Many thanks,
Willard

The wire is from a casting core. The wires helped hold the sand cores together. When the head was "shaken out" the wire remained. The 'T'-shaped piece was also used to hold the water passage cores together. It's common to pull over 6' of casting-core wire from a slant six head.

_________________
Joshua

from back in my early foundry days,
cutting and bending the wire(s) to a proper shape was an essential department within the core room of a foundry that would produce heads and blocks. The wires would reinforce the oil sand cores, simular to how wire is used in concrete today. The thinner wires in cylinder head cores, at least the ones that could be gotten to, were removed and discarded when the casting was cleaned and trimmed prior to machining. What was not pulled out, stayed in.Never knew the remaining wires to cause an issue. It was interesting to walk through a machining and engine assembly area back then,, one would see random wires, ferrel tubes sticking out of water jacket openings and laying on the floor that the in process castings passed over,, For some crankcase cores the wires were 3/8 inch in diameter and welded together. These large wires were removed at shake out and re turned to the core room for re-use. By the 70's oil sand was replaced by furfural (hot box) and the wires were no longer needed. By the 80's furfural was replaced by phenolic urethane.. (cold box) (cold set) which remains the basis of the core system still in use today for high volume production of iron blocks and heads. Aluminum engine castings will be: die, permanent mold, and some lost foam cast. The Perm mold system will use a cold box core process as described above.

Alright then, that explains everything! Thanks for your fast and interesting reply's.