as many may know, even on a manual transmission car, the bottom tank of the radiator has an automatic transmission cooler in it. my idea is the possibility of running oil lines to the transmission cooler, to cool the oil in say... a tow vehicle or the like. No clue if it'd work, and I'd like to hear peoples thoughts on it before even coming close to attempting it in the future. has anyone ever heard of this or tried it?
Yeah, the passage is too large to use as a bypass type cooler, but too small to use as a full flow cooler. There were some GM vehicles that had an engine oil cooler built into the radiator in the 70s/80s (and probably later, but I quit working on late models before then), usually bigger trucks, and diesel powered things. The oil cooler passages were larger than transmission cooler passages.
GM does that on trucks but the cooler lines are much bigger and the trans cooler may not be strong enough for oil pressure.
When I had my transmission done by TSI Don Stanley . He highly recommended not using the radiator for cooling the fluid. A simple aftermarket one would work better and add more volume and wouldn’t be subjected to heat from the radiator .
Down to a vote, I'd vote using aux. coolers as a better choice. #1 reason, additional capacity. Those trans. rad coolers must serve a duty to loose heat in transfer, but capacity is limited to what, maybe a pint of fluid? How much heat can be lost to that coolant for that to be of value has to be chocked up to some better then none, or it helps a bit, and it looks good on paper. That said, they are nice little cooler pods when removed.
Isn't the trans 'cooler' in the bottom of the radiator actually a heater, for the purpose of warming the initially cold trans fluid in order to remove condensation? Or is that just some bollocks I've read on the Internet thats stuck with me? Chris
After having a late model transmission shit itself when the cooling tank at the bottom of the radiator decided to allow water to mix with the trans fluid, I would highly recommend only using an auxiliary cooler. Transmissions are not cheap to rebuild........ Water in the engine oil would probably not be ideal either.
Dedicated cooler for engine oil. If you need it ? Bigger question is where are you pulling pressurized oil from and returning? Common engines, aftermarket adapters are sold for oil filter area..but.... Listen to @squirrel - find a factory application with oil cooler and buy those parts. If you pursue it - hard line everything, I wouldn't trust the health of the engine oiling system to rubber hose and hose clamps.
I can add this, dealing with late model GM trucks with the factory oil cooler. You can have a truck that the bearings rattle on start up and eliminating the oil cooler will both increase the oil pressure and the motor no longer rattles on start up. I have not done hundreds but I have don quite a few.
Your head is in the right place and conceptually you have the right idea, but as others have mentioned, this one probably isn't going to work. The external auxiliary oil cooler will work better both by adding capacity and by actually using the surface area of the cooler to cool the oil. That being said, is something like this actually necessary for your application? Since oil lines are significantly pressurized, this creates another failure point in your setup, perhaps unnecessarily.
Are you sure there's a trans cooler in the stick cars, or did Ford just use the same tanks on everything and plug the holes in the cars with stick transmissions? I honestly don't know, just thinking out loud. Also, is this a Y block? Because Y blocks already have issues pumping oil to all the places they need it, I don't think I'd add any more distance/obstacles for that oil pump to push oil through.
What type of engine are you considering this for? I've always thought about running tubes through the oil sump from front to back and welding them. Then you can always deepen the sump or enlarge it sideways with an add on ......if you have room. No moving parts except the air flowing thru the tubes as you drive.
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