/6 conversion, oil cooler Options

[930cabman]

Is an external oil cooler required for a /6 conversion? The Palma Green car needs a bit of work prior to the install, so we have a bit of time. Newly rebuilt 2.7 will be fit with Webers and driven on the street only.
TIA

[Cairo94507]

I have had a few different oil coolers in my Sixes over the decades. The cheapest cooler system was the one that came on my current Six and was installed around 1980 according to the PO. It was just 1/2" copper plumbing pipe soldered together to run from the engine oil cooler up the long and across the nose and back to the engine. The former owner told me the 3.0 motor never over heated. I never drove the car on the streets enough to confirm that. But here are some pictures of that system. Crude, but easy to build.












I also had this very effective oil cooler system on another Six I owned. I was running a 3.0 in that too. This was 2 VW 411 oil coolers (cheap) mounted one in each fog light grill opening and connected with SS braided line that ran to a thermostat mounted on the engine firewall on the passenger side. The downside was no fog lights. But relatively inexpensive and easy to do. This was in about 1985, so pardon the low-quality work. This was my daily driver and it was a nice car but not show worthy for sure.









I personally really like the GT front oil cooler setup I have in my current car. It is very clean and effective. We modified the valance for the cooler opening and chose not to the corresponding bumper modification. We pulled 5 black nose plugs out to allow air to enter and figured if that was not sufficient, we could modify the bumper later. Thus far it has worked very well and I have sat in stopped traffic for approximately 40 minutes in 100+ degree heat. Now in that stopped traffic the engine did get up to about 235 degrees, but that is still not bad. And as soon as we started moving it dropped right down to about 190.

The only thing I do not like about my current setup is the thermostat was mounted in the front trunk near the oil cooler despite my request to mount it on the passenger side engine firewall. Not a huge problem; the next time we work on my car (when the rain stops) we are going to begin the process of moving the thermostat to the engine firewall where it belongs. Fortunately the thermostat was mounted with double sided tape, so no holes. We will remove that and make up new hoses to go from the driver's footwell connection right to the cooler- should look very clean.