justinray
Contributor
If I put a cooler inline with an amsoil remote filter setup, would I lose a detrimental amount of pressure in my lube system?
Okay, I see now. Couple things:
You'll need a thermostat of some sort. Otherwise you'll never get the oil up to temp in normal operation which is very bad. You want to get oil temps up to around 180* as soon as possible. I've got an oil sump temp gauge on my rig and oil sump temps lag the coolant temp a good bit as it is - it takes a good 10 miles on the freeway to get the sump up to normal temp. With a full flow air cooler I doubt you'll get up to 180 any time other than hard pulls. Getting the oil temp up is critical to drive off condensation and it also is important for effective lubrication, filtration and efficient operation of the engine.
I don't think the cooler you linked is big enough. The idi oil pump is rated 18.2 gpm @ 3000 rpm. Best I can find for a SBC is 5-6 gpm. I'd want a cooler with at least 3/4 and ideally 1" flow ports and a comparably sized core for a full flow cooler.
What I think would work better would be to setup a dedicated oil circuit with a bypass filter and a cooler - use a small electric pump or some sort on belt driven setup to get a few gpm flow through a cooler and then back to the sump, then add a bypass filter bleeding off the main oil system (probably tie into the turbo feed line) Problem is it's not cheap to get an oil rated electric pump. Might try building something belt driven.
Even if it can stand that temp, that doesn't mean it's good for the oil or the engine.... Something like 180-220* is the optimal oil temp but for engine and oil longevity.
Whether you need an additional cooler to keep it at that temp is another question. I find that my oil sump temp will get up to 230-240* under a prolonged heavy load, but that's with a turbo. On a non turbo I doubt it's gets that hot. Even with the turbo it's not really needed. On the other hand, it certainly doesn't hurt to add cooling capacity, provided you have some sort of thermal regulation to keep from over cooling.
Adding more oil cooling will also help reduce the load on the engine cooling system. A pretty significant amount of heat is dumped into the oil via the piston cooling jet, which then gets dumped into the water.