Experimenting With Oil Cooler Installation

I’ve been toying with various install locations for the oil cooler.  I would prefer not to mount it on the baffles for a couple of reasons.  First, it’s really tight there because of the size of the 10559R oil cooler.  Second, people already have problems with the baffles cracking due to the weight of the oil cooler.  Since this oil cooler is larger than typical, it will contain more oil and will therefore weigh even more than normal.  I would have to reinforce the baffles even more than builders normally need to carry the extra weight.

I tried various positions on the firewall, but things are really tight there.  There is one spot that could work, but it would require building a custom bracket and significantly reinforcing the firewall.  After playing with various mounting locations, I stumbled on the possibility of mounting it between two of the engine mount tubes.  I mounted it temporarily using a few adel clamps to see if it would work.  There’s a little bit of flex, but this is surprisingly strong.  I can move the entire plane by pushing and pulling on this.  If I go with this location, I’ll move it down a little bit and fabricate a bracket that lets me use two adel clamps on the top flange to prevent twisting.  This will give me a little more clearance for the control cables as well as make the upper engine mount tube be a little move out of the way.

You can see that there is plenty of room between the back of the engine and the oil cooler.  I will mount a flange on the back of the baffles (either 3″ or 4″) and run some scat tube down to a custom plenum that I will fabricate to direct the air through the oil cooler.  I want to sleep on it and run it by the folks on vansairforce.net to make sure there aren’t any issues with this plan.

The fuel pressure line runs right by the back side of the oil cooler.  I’ll install an adel clamp here to space the line a little bit away from the oil cooler flange.

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