Oil coolers in the X... are they worth it?

Andrew Coles

Andrew Coles

Say no to rice
I'm trying to decide if I should go to the trouble of fitting an oil cooler to my X19. If I did it I'd go down the sandwich plate route, leaving the filter where it is.

The engine is a moderately warm 1500 and the car will be used for fast road and track work, its no daily driver. I like the idea of removing as much heat as possible from mechanical components (this is always a problem racing during an Australian summer), but I'm a little worried about the engine oil running too cool.

Ideally I'd like a manually controllable tap. Leave the cooler out of the equation during warm up and road use, and be able to route the oil through the cooler when we hit the track. I dont even know if such a setup is possible, this just seems to me to be the logical way to do it.

Either way, any advice or experiance would be a great help :p

Andrew
 
Thermostat

You can get inline thermostatic control valves for oil coolers which sounds like what you want rather than a manual valve.

carl
 
oil cooler

i have one installed and also installed a remote filter to ease the oil change maintenance and they seem to help the temperature /maintenance.
 
Andrew,

The ideal solution here is an oil/water heat exchanger, such as a Laminova: http://www.hi-flow.com/HPOC1.HTM

A huge advantage to this system is that your oil heats up quicker, which is a real plus on a track car where you want full oil temp before going full bore-- it can take several laps to get full oil temps in the winter if you have a conventional cooler setup, even with a thermostat.

Another big advantage is stability of the oil temp over a wide variety of ambient and operating conditions.

Obviously, there is a significant packaging advantage over air/oil heat exchangers as well.

IMO, water/oil heat exchangers are the only way to go. Check them out and let us know what you find.

Cheers,

///Mike
 
I have an oil cooler on the FAZA X... Here is a Pic...

x-5.jpg
 
...OT.... is your engine cover flush with the trunk lid? It looks like the version with the side panels sits lower than the fugly one on my '87.....
 
jjay911 said:
I have an oil cooler on the FAZA X... Here is a Pic...

x-5.jpg
Click to expand...

Jeff - the oil cooler came setup this way when you aquired the car correct?

I am asking this cuz I don't know but would like to know:
Is that the right place for it? Should it be lower/closer to the side air inlet?
-Tim
 
Yea it came like that. It is still mounted in the car. I have no idea what is the optimal place to put it but I have plenty of braided hose to work with in case someone comes up with a better place to put it....:)
 
Thanks for the ideas guys.

JJ, I was thinking of mounting it in exactly the same place. Once you remove the carbie cooling fan theres a big empty open area just waiting for it. Without moving it, it would probably be possible just to run some ducting or something up there from the side intake.

Mike, I really do like the idea of the water cooler, I think it would work very well. In the end though, I've decided to go for a conventional air type oil cooler. I went out to the local self serve wreckers and grabbed one off a Mistusbishi Magna. Its a proper Denso cooler, and it only cost me 10 bucks! Combined with one of those sandwich plate/thermostat's from Summit racing and I think it will be a nice and not too expensive solution. Some mates are running these coolers on their Alfa's and they work really well.

Thanks a lot for the advice everyone. If anyone needs one of these coolers I can grab one next time I'm out there and ship it over to you. Worst case scenario is the guy on the gate charges me the proper price for it... but thats still only $30 :)
 
get

get a uno turbo oil cooler,pipes , oil filter+ mounting . that would be a plug-in-play setup for your engine. only issue you will have will be to find a place for the oil cooler ....


good luck



PS> i am thinking how to get mine out from engine bay , couse i don;t have enough space in the car for it :d
 
VWs have used a sandwich type oil to water cooler for a very long time (early GTIs and newer). It would require adding two more lines but should be possible to integrate one.

They help in two ways, they can warm the oil after startup to get it up to temperature and then keep the temp around 190 all the time. As the X cooling system is generally oversized it should be fine.
 
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