I have been unfairly criticised for leaving everything to the eleventh hour. This is a gross exaggeration - I leave it until 11:45! :wink:
On the eve of the P6 Club's Northern National at the Bowes Museum, County Durham, I decided it was finally time to finish off this project (18 months after starting!!) and fit the oil cooler to my TC.
In my defence, a lot has happened over the past 18 months and I've needed the car most weekends. This upgrade was never key to performance either - it was just a belt-and-braces bolt-on to stop oil pressure dropping slightly at idle on the motorway exit slip after a sustained run on the far side of 4000 rpm. I loathe the sound of those chains gargling away in my lovely engine! Even if it is only 10 mins before the oil cools enough to restore normal pressure.
Hard to know where to pick up after such a long gap. I'll start from the beginning.
IMG_1877 by
michaeljallen19, on Flickr
I wasn't satisfied that I knew the integrity of the hoses. After all of the effort required to fit, the last thing I wanted was a leak - or worse a rupture! It also just didn't sit right with me to put 40+ year old used rubber components onto my engine. So I set about procuring a replacement. In the end I went for
this which is 19mm ID stainless steel braided high performance racing hose, capable of withstanding oil, petrol, water, the lot - up to 120 degrees at 220 PSI. Perfectly adequate for my needs.
For anybody interested in replicating this without the original hoses to measure, both of the long hoses need to be 25" long with an internal diameter of 3/4" (19mm exactly, give or take). Outside diameter is irrelevant.
I ordered 3m but got almost 4m so have about 1.5m left over. If anybody wants to make up replacement short hoses, feel free to take it off my hands.
These were the hoses before. As you can see, they were starting to weep a fraction. The hoses are held on the brass unions with an alloy crimp. Nothing fancy. It isn't possible to open them (or at least I couldn't find a way) to reuse them, but jubilee clips suffice just as well. Here is the shorter pick-up pipe made up. Jubilees are deliberately angled to facilitate tightening is situ should the need ever arise.
I fitted new 1" x 1/8" O-rings and refitted. Easy stuff.
For the long hoses, I needed to cannabalise several sets of unions together to get the configuration I wanted. As you can in the very first photo in this thread, the engine block union for the cooler pipe did not have the threaded hole to accept the oil pressure sender. I bought one of the T-piece adaptors, but in the end realised that I could just as easily fit the standard TC union (with sender) to the new oil cooler pipe. The other unions are also slightly different - longer and with bends in them to direct the pipes a bit better towards the front of the engine bay (180 degrees away form where the standard short pipe points).
All in situ:
The next part is the tricky bit (and if I'm honest is the real reason why I've ever bothered to do this job earlier). Finding a way to mount the oil cooler radiator is a bit tricky! First of all it involves dismantling the front of your car!
Then you've got the problem of putting it somewhere. You want it to go here:
because that's where it's meant to go. But the horn is in way and there's nothing to bolt it to - it genuinely is just thin air in the area it's meant to be.
It's also quite a bit tighter behind the 4-cyl valance than you'd think! So it can't come too far out too far or it'll hit the valance, but you can't mount it too close the cross member as the pipes (visible behind) will have to form a very tight S-bend around the crossmember and risk kinking.
Time for a cuppa...
The solution came in the form of mounting the horn on the otherside by bolting it upside down to the same bracket as the other one. Simply run a pair of wires from one to the other to connect them in parallel and you're away.
Next involved cutting out this origami piece of steel
And bending and welding it to shape. It's not just a bit of box, it's deliberately angular to translate the angled plane of the crossmember into a flat end plate that is penpendicular to the length of the car, thereby allowing the cooler rad to sit in line with the water radiator , and not jutting out at all funny angles where it would the valance. Drill two holes and bolt it up the empty horn bracket using the old horn bolts.
Wack the oil cooler on the front and you're laughing!
Can't yet comment on the results. I'm quite sure oil pressure and temperature is now much more consistent at high revs, but unfortunately - after 3.5 hours' sleep and a 5:30 alarm call, I was on my way to meeting Mick Burke (happydays) and the Manchester crew to travel in convoy to the Club National rally at Bowes when an almighty knocking sound started originating from the top of my engine. Think another cam bearing cap has snapped. I replaced
one cracked one the other week, but should have replaced them all - just laziness on my part really. When I got the car there was no cam cover gasket - just Hylomar and the cover was cracked down super tight on the completely perished rubber doughnuts. All of this was rectified when I rebuilt the engine but the three studded bearing caps are drilled and tapped right through, and being cast, they must have had hairline cracks in them that I didn't detect. The shear force in normal operation was obviously too much for them to take and one had split randomly a few weeks ago. Suspect another must have gone. Sigh....
Still, I'm sure the rally was a roaring success regardless! Would love to have been there.
Michael
