Just put a Y in the oil cooler line with a valve. Somebody suggested you can get 12v computer fans really inexpensively. I found a small heat exchanger from a Pontiac sunbird for real cheap. It's about 6 x 4 or so, so it will tuck into a small space.
DLW...i think your more interested in making something different. but to answere your question. YES what i see would give plenty of winter heat. but burn your ass up in summer. and i mean without the fan motor on. when you get cold enough, you'll put a real box heater under the dash. don't believe me, wait untell it get's realy COLD...POP.
I live in the mountains of Colorado (fairly cold). The experience I've had with using oil as the heating medium has been both with older VW's and a 2-Ton GMC truck that was factory equipped with a 6-cylinder, turbocharged Deutz air-cooled diesel engine. On both of these, they are quite slow to get up to temperature from a cold start and unless you are at highway speed or climbing a hill, the heat is almost non-esistant. When idling in traffic, there is basically no heat at all.
Have you looked at the old Stewart Warner Southwind heaters, they use a fuel line "t'd" off of the carb, pretty cool little unit, mines gutted and acts as my battery box.
Unless you have an inline pump, you can't take the water from the back of one head and return it to the other. Without a pump, the water pressure is the same in both heads. There has to be a difference of water pressure between the inlet and the outlet of your heater core or the water will just sit in one place without moving. An inline pump would move the water from one head, through your heater core and back to the other head because it sucks on one side of the pump and pushes on the other, thus creating a pressure difference. A heater works by blowing cold air from your car's interior across a series of heated pipes (called a heater core). The fan removes the heat from the water and puts it in the air. If you take all the heat out of the still hot water, it very quickly becomes still cold water. It doesn't do us any good to blow air across cold pipes with cold water in them. We have to replace that cold water with more hot water from the engine. We have to move that cold water out and pump more hot water in so that we can remove its heat and put it into the air inside the car. If I understood your other question correctly, "Would it not flow and create a cool spot of coolant or will it absorb heat from the rest of the system?" - the heat from the engine will not seep through any still water fast enough to keep you warm. Nor will the cool spot of water induce flow because of any temperature differences. You need a pump to get that water moving. If you use an inline pump, there's no reason you can't take the water from one head and return it to the other (if there's good a place on the head to attach a pipe).
The Jalopy Journal
