Invent’n Winton

Remember these ram air window coolers?

For me it was 3rd grade, Wink, TX. (circa 1953) My father, for whatever reason, did not buy one. He came up with his own design…sort of a “Tim (the tool man) Taylor” idea…bigger, better and badder than anything Sears and Roebuck sold. His design was a ram-air plenum that extended over the top and spanned the entire width of the car. It stood nearly 12 inches high and the inlet, the entire front side, was opened and fitted with a porous pad.

Built from galvanized sheet metal the long box, with a “u-turn” shape at one end, brought the ram air from the outside of the car down and around into the passenger side front window.

At highway speed the oncoming hot dry air would be forced into the box though the inlet passing over a wet mat…which cooled the air by the evaporation process…then into the car.

It was held on the top of the car with four pairs of suction cups and straps with hooks...borrowed from his car-top luggage rack. Everybody had a car-top carrier back then and every car had rain gutters (drip rails) to hook onto.

The water reservoir, for wetting the pad, was a 5 gal can located in the trunk and somehow through an elaborate system of piping, plumbing and pumps it got to the box on the roof.

Evaporative type coolers work well in dry climates. The larger the spread between the wet bulb (dew point) and dry bulb temperatures the better they worked. And it worked great in the dry West Texas town of Wink.

There were a few drawbacks. First, it only worked at highway speeds because the air supply stopped when you stopped. This made sitting at red lights problematic. Second, in my father’s massive design, it allowed water to collect in the large roof top plenum. During a left turn the same forces that opened doors...flinging the unsuspecting out into the street...acted upon the lake of water producing a tsunami that would surprise and almost drown the front seat passenger.

That very summer my father was transferred to Southern California where we enjoyed the constant 72 degree temperature…and that’s the last I remember of that experiment.

Apparently my "Invent'n Winton" interests for tinkering, building and inventing were inherited.

Thanks, Dad, for the memories.