You’ll often hear oil referred to as the lifeblood of an engine. While this metaphor stretches things a bit, it is true that if you lose all of each fluid–or it gets hot to the point of chemical failure–bad things will happen.
We recommend avoiding both situations.
You’re on your own for the blood thing, but we have taken several …
We've found in the motorcycle engined cars my class runs, that oil temps are at least as important as coolant temps, so we run a very similar system to the one in the MR2, except we just put the biggest oil cooler we can in one of the sidepods with no fans, just ducting. The common wisdom is that the Setrab oil coolers seems to be noticeably better than the others.
"You're on your own with the blood thing"
Good Stuff!!
Very interesting, I have a Setrab oil cooler in my '90 300ZX TT, but had not thought of adding cooling fan.....I need to look at this seriously. The Setrab and some mods to the cooling system have worked wonders in keeping temps down, but anything more I can do can't be a bad thing.
I installed a rather large Setrab oil cooler for the Supra project, no complaints there. It's wedged between the intercooler and coolant radiator, all ducted.
Personally, I would think a mid engine setup would want ducting to feed that cooler, but that's just me. I very much subscribe to the school of thought that air is lazy, so if you don't force it to work for you... it won't.
te72 said:I installed a rather large Setrab oil cooler for the Supra project, no complaints there. It's wedged between the intercooler and coolant radiator, all ducted.
Personally, I would think a mid engine setup would want ducting to feed that cooler, but that's just me. I very much subscribe to the school of thought that air is lazy, so if you don't force it to work for you... it won't.
Technically it doesn't have any less ducting than the original intercooler. It's fed by the side intake which does a pretty good job of bringing in fresh air, I just didn't build any specific ducting so air can also get around the cooler into the engine compartment. From there I've got two Derale fans that will mount on the engine lid and suck air up out of the engine compartment. So I kind of made the initial choice in favor of total air volume into the engine bay and max flow-through.
In reply to JG Pasterjak :
Interesting, I didn't realize that the stock stuff wasn't ducted. That's kinda unlike Toyota, in my experience. MR2's are a bit... different, is what I'm finding out with my AW11.
I would imagine that the cooler fans should help keep things in check. Where else does the car get fresh air from? SW20's had two engine bay intakes, correct? If so, I'd personally try to make one by 3d printing a simple duct. Mine on the Supra were fabricated with aluminum sheet, rivets, and some sealant. Not what you call pretty, but they work very well. The last heat exchanger in the line, the radiator, only sees temps over 190° after particularly hard autocross runs on small lots. Then the fans kick on and things are back to normal within a minute.
Also worth considering, your engine consumes 3.5L of air *per complete cycle*. How many liters of space are there in the entire engine bay? ...and at 5000+ rpm, how often must that engine bay air be refreshed by atmospheric pressure? Math's fun sometimes. =P
The stock MR2 intercooler does have ducting, and many/most of the aftermarket IC kits include a block off plate.
Alex W, if I remember right, makes oil cooler setups for the SW20 which includes a block off plate/surround
Im certain JG could fab something up for his setup.
I love this build, Always awesome to see a MKII get love
I know it's been a while. Have you checked your pressure when the accumulator is discharging? is there no need for a check valve to stop back flow toward the oil cooler? Lastly, were you able to install the oil cooler with the engine in?
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