Oil cooler advice - mocal take off plate

[davebem]

Hope someone can help..I want to replace an oil/coolant heat exchange unit on the back of an Alfa V6 engine for a take off plate and piped proper air-oil cooler radiator. Ive measured the readily available mocal take off/sandwich plate with thermostat and it will fit. However the mocal plate is designed to have an adapter for the size of the filter thread (mine is m20). Crucially these adapters are only available with an extender as it is assumed the filter screw wont be long enough.

This is the mocal plate, i have crossed out the adapter with extender.


The Alfa engine already has a long oil filter screw due to removal of heat exchanger so it doesnt need the extender which forms part of the mocal adapter. How can I get around this, will the oil cooler still be effective with no adapter (assuming it was centered correctly)?

Alfa V6 with heat exchanger and filter removed.

Edited by davebem on Monday 10th October 12:43

[davebem]

E-bmw said:

All you do is to not use the adaptor.

The adaptor sits in a hole in the sandwich plate & then tightens the plate in place and allows you to screw the filter on.

Yours already has a threaded section long enough.

Remove the lock nut on the threaded section, fit the sandwich plate in the orientation that you want & tighten the locknut onto it to hold it in place.

This is what I wanted to hear thanks, the locknut should be enough to hold it in place, ill try this.

Thanks for sharing the AlfaDax site, thats amazing, it looks like he used a take off plate to relocate the filter, but his is either a 3.0, or a 3.2 that already has provisions for oil cooler, where mine is a 2.5 that only has the heat exchanger setup.

[davebem]

I finally got around to doing this.

Old heat exchanger removed.


I went for a 16 row narrow cooler, and added a spacer so the take off plate clears the 2.5 exchanger housing.


Test fitting,I need to make sure the pipes clear the driveshaft, manifold heatshield and dont get in the way of oil filter changes! Then they will route under the engine along with the power steering pipes to the front somewhere.


I have a few questions I couldnt easily find on the net.
For the male to male fittings that screw direct into the take off plate, should I use some sort of thread sealing compound as there is no rubber washer?
It looks like the flow to the cooler is never sealed off, the thermostat just controls direct flow to the filter, blocking the easiest path once its closed forcing all the flow through the cooler, so does the orientation of the take off plate affect its operation? e.g. is it relying on gravity, do the cooler inlet and outlet need to be at the bottom? It needs to go at an angle.

Edited by davebem on Friday 21st July 10:30