Deleting engine oil cooler

[Phoenix-MN]

Has anyone deleted the stock engine oil cooler and then modified the cooler by cutting the the cooling fins off from the mounting plate? Then welding In/Out bungs to the plate and run line to an external cooler mounted on the front of the car. The engine oil thermostat would still direct hot/cold oil appropriately to the engine and remote cooler.

The oil circuit would look like this

[TimT]

Probably easier and cleaner to just get a 993 filter console and associated bits

[Walt Fricke]

Probably not. You don't want to run oil under full oil pump pressure through all those lines and fittings before it can lubricate the engine. You are sure to get pressure drops which you won't much like. This will surely be the case if you put your cooler up front, as you are proposing.

Much easier to run the scavenge oil up front to a big center cooler, then back to the oil tank. If your car already has a front cooler (even the trombone loop), just use those lines, and replace the front cooler, or plumb the stock front cooler as the 2d cooler (so your more efficient added cooler in the center of the font valance gets the hottest oil).

This works especially well with a front mounted oil tank.

What can be done if you conclude that your front cooling is so efficient that you don't need the engine mounted cooler is to do what you are thinking of - cut off all the radiator parts, weld a plate over the area by the two ports where the oil goes in and out, and weld in AN fittings. You need to offset one of them, because these holes are too close together and you need room for the coupling nuts, and to get a wrench on the second one after you have tightened the first. Anyone who can TIG could do this, and a shop probably won't charge much.

You can then either run a cooler back in the rear (Anderson says that mounting the cooler in a race car in the rear in good air flow worked well), or you can do what Porsche did with the 2.8 race motors, and then with the 964s and 993s. The thermostat is fixed so it always routes oil to where the cooler was mounted, but the oil goes through an oil filter. This second filter will catch anything which got through the filter in front of the oil tank, or anything which otherwise somehow got into the tank, or stray bits of rubber or something in the lines from tank to pressure pump.

Porsche mounted the filter to the plate attached instead of the oil cooler, but it is easy enough to run lines to some other nearby place to a chassis mounted filter. Instead of fabricating this plate adapter, you can just acquire the Porsche part.

But use the scavenge pump to send oil to a cooler up front.