Oil cooler routing question

wstar

The routing looks reasonably sane. If you're worried about certain spots, you can always just glue down a tiny patch of rubber on e.g. the crash bumper where the hose contacts it, as an extra barrier against wear. Those braided hoses shouldn't have any issues with kink, it should be just about mechanically impossible to kink off the flow in them without using some pretty serious force.

There is no "backup" if your oil system fails. If one of your lines blows off or something becomes plugged, you will lose pressure and the engine will be damaged if not shut off immediately. There's a factory "low pressure" sensor that triggers a dash warning, but by the time you notice it, it may be too late. Oil filters don't generally have a clog problem as they have a bypass valve in them. The oil system does seem to have some built-in relief around 100psi (when watching an oil pressure gauge during cold startup), but tbh I'm not sure if that's intrinsic to the car and bypasses the whole filter/cooler route, or if that's just the relief valve in the filter doing that.

The main thing to watch out for on these installs is that the front swaybar can't bang into the fittings coming off of your sandwich plate. If they're oriented poorly, it's a possibility. The swaybar gets maximally close to the fittings when the wheels are fully dropped (as in, the car's jacked up in the air by the frame, and the front suspension is hanging loose), so that's how you want to check clearance.

I'd highly recommend adding an oil pressure gauge of some kind to the system. It can alert you to stupid problems long before the factory pressure switch does. The one I chose also has a programmable low pressure alarm output, which I wired to a loud annoying buzzer in the cockpit. Regardless, just having the gauge there gives you instant verification that nothing's horribly wrong, and as you learn what "normal" looks like under various conditions you might detect problems much quicker.

Spearfish's oil pressure DIY: DIY: Oil Pressure Gauge

Info on my gauge/setup: wstar's Journal

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