2 birds with one stone??, heat and oil line routing in one....hmmm Options

[East coaster]

I'm still plotting a heat scheme. I really want to have heat/defrosters in my 3.6 conversion. I've entertained the idea of a gas heater, which would probably work fine. I've also considered trying to get something to work off of the oil cooler. Now, I was just looking at the Elephant racing finned oil lines and thought hey, maybe I could route finned oil lines through the old heater passages (solves oil line routing to front cooler) and still fan force air through the passages and derive heat from the finned lines. I would have to come up with a way to port the lines into the ducts and out while still keeping the ducts semi-sealed. This doesn't seem insurmountable.

For all you thermodynamists out there, would this work for heat??

[East coaster]

Dunk, Thanks for the real world feedback! I figured somebody has BTDT. I guess I'm looking at somesort of heat exchanger or a gas heater. I have a set of stock 914-6 HEs, but it looks like I'd have to hack them up pretty good to fit on a 3.6 and I know the diameter is less than optimum (read sucky) for a 3.6.

If I go the HE route I'd like to find a set of stainless headers and fabricate a heater box on each. I've fabbed aircraft HEs and in the aircraft world we add either a coiled spring or fins/spikes to the header pipe to aid in heat transfer. It's funny I've never seen that done in the Porsche world. It really does make a big difference. On my aircraft exhaust I welded two little rings, one at each end of the heater box run, and use a long coil spring (similar to a screen door spring) and attach one end to one ring , wrap it around the header pipe till I get to the other ring and attach it. I noticed it damn near doubled my heat output and gave me an additonal 50 rpm drop with carb heat on.