Hi all. Very nice site here.

I've had and have been restoring(slowly) a '70 914 for the last 15 years or so and it's always had an oil cooler mounted above the motor on the hinging cover. The guy who had the car before me must have installed it.

I'm trying to get opinions of whether or not I should keep this on the car. I live in AZ and it get's real hot here but I don't really do a lot of driving in the summer. Mostly spring and fall.

The thing is, this cooler is a pain in the arse. It keeps too much weight on the lid so you have to tie it or prop it for working on the motor. I'd love jst to take it out, which brings up the next question. The lines to the cooler come from the filter boss. When the lines come out, do you just plug the holes? I have no idea what the OEM setup was.

TIA for any comments.

Chris

Quick answer, not for a stock engine. Oil coolers there don't work very well anyway.

with the burger boy ...

on a stock engine, even in AZ, there's no need for a external cooler, especially on the engine lid, where all it does is pre-heat your combustion air!
if it comes off the filter, the PO (previous owner) used a "sandwich" plate which can be easily removed. remove oil filter, remove sandwich plate, put oil filter back on.

Andy

Excellent. Thanks very much guys.

Chris

do you have an oil temp gauge?

if so, block the airflow to just the cooler (block with some cardboard) and go for a drive. if that doesn't result in excessive temps, you're probably okay.

depending on how that cooler was plumbed ito the oil system, i'd probably find a way to bypass it with the shortest available hose - but leave the sandwich plate (or whatever else) in place. add a temp gauge if it doesn't have one. that way if the temps -do- get hotter than you like, and you decide to mount a more effective cooler in a better place, it won't be as big a deal. and since it probably wasn't done with a thermostat, you can bypass it in the "winter" and restore it in the summer.

but yeah - probably, on a stock-ish engine on the street, it's doing you more haarm than good.

oh - sanity check - BEFORE deciding to pull it, VERIFY that the PO hasn't done something stupid like pull the factory cooler. you definitely need SOME kind of cooler, but the factory one works fine for most stock, street cars.

Thanks Rich. Good advice.

Yes, I have a temp guage and the car does have the OEM cooler still. I pulled the cooler and sandwich plate off today. Now I just have to remember where the oil temp was at!

I think around 180-190. What's considered to be normal?

A bigger issue now. When I pulled the plate, 3 parts fell out with it. A ball, spring and metal cup. Looking inside the filter boss, I can see where these parts go. Right next to where the filter screws to there's a hole. Looks to me like this is a bypass, correct? The spring goes in first, then the ball, then the retaining cup, yes? I could just get the cup started in to the hole, to seat it I'd have to use a correctly sized socket and tap it in the rest of the way. I guess that's a good thing it doesn't push in with just finger pressure.

I question why these parts were 'loose' in there, but after living with seeing what the guy before me did in different areas of the car, nothing would surprise me.

Chris

that's a bit too cold! running temp should be between 195 and 210 ...
230+ is too hot ...

Andy

like Andy, i like to see 95C in operation. 180F is considered 'operating temperature' - the minimum temp at which you can stand on it -- but that was the 'conventional wisdom' 40 years ago or so and we have lots better oils now -- even the dino-oils are way better. but it's a good round number anyway.

180F is also the temperature at which most thermostats open, and i think it's a little too cool, but we're limited by what we can get.

i can't help you on the sandwich plate, my engines don't use them. but all that stuff is in the pressure circuit on a T-IV and considering the price of parts, if i were even a little suspicious about the condition of a part, i'd replace it if i at all could. i hate the thought of losing a $7500 engine to a $75 part.

Thanks guys.

I should have been more clear.

The parts that fell out have nothing to do with the sandwich plate. When I took the plate off, the spring, ball and cup were above that, coming from where the original filter went. I believe they are supposed to be in the original housing/boss that the filter screws on to.

The question is...............do they? I can't find a picture or breakdown in my manual that confirms. If these parts were in, all you would see looking up at the filter housing(with filter off), would be the metal cup pressed into a hole with 1/3 of the ball showing. The more I think about it and look at it, I'm 99% sure it's the oil pressure relief.

The car is a '70 1.7 liter.

Chris

You are correct - that is the oil pressure relief valve that is pressed into the filter housing. It's purpose is to allow oil to continue to flow (unfiltered) if the oil filter cloggs up. Considered by many to be unnecessary since the oil filters have their own relief bypass built-in (maybe they didn't back in the early '70's). Many times during rebuilds the rebuilder will remove that relief valve setup and press in a plug.

I don't know how comfortable I would be with just tapping it back in place because it probably won't stay. Maybe if some sort of adhesive is used (like cylindrical loc-tite or something) it will be OK.

Too bad the oil filter housing is nearly impossible to remove with the engine in the car (if I remember correctly that is). Otherwise you could just swap out the housing instead of trying to fix the relief valve.

Demick

Thanks Demick. I think what I'll do is see how firmly the retainer presses back in to the cavity and go from there. I'll drop the filter in a few hundred miles and see if it's still in place. Worst case scenario is that it's laying on top of the filter.

The adverse effect I can see of leaving it in place is an amount of oil, if any, simply bypassing altogether, clean filter or not. The pressure it takes to push that ball into the cavity is pretty slight. A constant flow of unfiltered oil through the motor couldn't be a good thing. I can see why a plug would be used instead.

Chris