Rb25 Oil Filter/cooler Setup

[Crans]

Just wanted some thought's on what people do with there RB25 oil filter/cooler.

Just taken the engine out of my R33 to finish up some hard to reach jobs, one of which includes a greedy style plenum install.

My car has an external oil cooler and the sandwhich plate sits on top of the existing oil filter block and leaves the stock oil cooler in place.

Im basically wanting to clean it up here are the options i can see:

1) Remove RB25 filter block(Including the so far hard to remove stud), and install an RB30 stud, This will allow the sandwhich plate to bolt directly to the block, pressure sensor will also need to be moved to the block

2) Install RB20 filter block and relocate the pressure sensor to the block

3) Leave everything as is and just remove the water lines going to the stock oil cooler

What do you think the best option is?

Problems i can see so far are:

That damn stud for the stock filter setup is proving very hard to remove.

Oil pressure sensor feels like it is too big to screw onto the rb25 block?

Is there any chance of the stock cooler leaking or having issues with no water lines plugged in?

Another idea i thought off while i disassembled the stock cooler is to make an adaptor that sits where the stock cooler is, this would then run directly to the new oil cooler without the need for the sandwhich plate. leaving the oil filter the screw in as the factory intended.

I will post up so pics of everything when i get home tonight.

Edited February 25, 2013 by Crans

[GTSBoy]

The stock cooler is not really a cooler. It's more of a warmer. The reason they are there is to try to get the oil to warm up faster as an emissions compliance thing. They do obviously move some heat from the oil into the coolant once you've got the whole thing hot and are working it hard (given that under those circumstances the oil could be 20°C hotter than the water), but that's not the main reason they're there.

On that basis, I like them. Getting the oil warm earlier is a good thing.

The tendency of these things to die and mix the oil and water originates with people (particularly in Japan) not doing coolant changes often enough /at all and the coolant turning acidic and eating away at the relatively thin material inside. If you look after them, they shouldn't fail.

Leaving it with no water on one side will do two things. 1) It will prevent any further corrosion. 2) It will leave oil system pressure on one side and no coolant system pressure on the other. That might (or might not) make it more prone to suffering a failure. Hard to know. Hard to know whether it's worth worrying about.

With respect to mounting the stock pressure sensor somewhere where it might not fit.....you can always use threaded adapters to make stuff go where it doesn't want to.

[Crans]

Sorry havn't had a change to get any pic's up yet.

My main reasons for wanting to remove the cooler/warmer are reports of them leaking(My car is nearly 20 years old now) and to clean up the piping mess under the plenum.

Do i need the warmer? My car is babied until up to temp, I will be putting in oil temp/pressure gauges.

I rekon i could tig up an adaptor fairly easily, to replace the cooler and sandwhich plate. But idealy it woul be better if it was milled from a single peice of metal. Also findin the correct bolt for the adaptor will be the tricky part. When I get the pics up you will see what i mean.

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

IMO, I say keep it..

I used to own a 180SX with a RB20, and as you know they don't come with the oil heat exchanger from factory. At the time I also ran an oil cooler (with thermostat of course) and it would take over 15 minutes most nights of normal driving to get the oil temperatures past 70 degrees. For a street car, I recommend having that heat exchanger, as it warms up the oil much quicker and brings it to the right operating viscosity.

Just my take on it, currently I have a R33 with a massive 19 row oil cooler but within 7 minutes of driving the oil pressure drops to under 3bar on idle. I'm not running an oil temp gauge on this car at the moment, but I can guess it's around 70~80 degrees when the pressure drops.

[Crans]

Well i have dissasembles the oil cooler unit and everything still looks to be in good shape, I might keep it on for now and just replace the hosing to it to make it a bit cleaner.

[Crans]

Just purchased an rb20 oil tree setup of ebay aswell as new gaskets. Do i now need to use an RB20 oil filter? I believe the 25 filter has extras built in to do with pressure relief?