What I am going to talk about here is adding an oil system to your engine. Here in Redding, Ca, it gets to be 100 plus degrees with no humidity (And humidity is important because when you put water through a fan, you cool things down). There are three major parts to this system: A sump, filter, and oil cooler.
Sump:
Adding a deep sump to an engine does a couple of things: 1) It simply adds more oil to your engine, so when you are going around corners at a high rate of speed, the pick up doesn’t get air. 2) More importantly, it keeps the cycle time down on the oil. In other words, it takes longer for the same oil to cycle through the system. This gives the oil a longer opportunity to cool down before getting thrown back into the heat. In most street applications, a 1 ½ quart sump is plenty. On a Friday Saterday nite kind of car, you might want to use the 3 ½ quart sump. On off road VWs, a sump can be a bad idea because it hangs down and you could rip it off the engine while your out playing.
Filter:
If you’re adding a cooler with lines, why not add a filter. The factory filter as you know is more of a rock guard. It only stops the big pieces from getting through. A filter that actually filters out the small debris is a great investment.
If you are “full flowed” then the pressure coming out of that pump is high and your normal paper filter can explode on cold mornings. I use a cleanable aluminum cased filter, like System One filters. They are expensive compared to a Fram filter, but will definitely pay for itself in the long run. Plus, being able to clean the filter means you can see what the filter has caught. The great thing here is,
if you run one of these types of filters and are having engine troubles you can split it and check to see if the motor has to come apart or something else is wrong before running it anymore and doing anymore damage.
Cooler:
I run the mesa style cooler over the old tube style cooler. The difference is, on the old tube style coolers the oil runs through the tubes and the fins on the tubes transfers the heat to the air. Also, it’s really easy to bend the fins over. When they get bent over, the air has trouble flowing through them. On the mesa style coolers, the oil runs through the fins themselves making them way more efficient. With the mesa style cooler, you would have to hit it with a hammer to bend the fins. It is a much stronger unit by far.
As far as placement goes, the old way was to place the cooler behind the fan intake. I do not agree with that at all. Here is my take on it: We are trying to get the heat out of the engine compartment, not run heat back through the motor. So, I mount them out of the engine compartment to get the heat away from the motor. On a Bug, Ghia, Thing, or Type 3, I mount them above the transmission on the left hand side. A 72-plate Mesa cooler works great here. Hang it down at least an inch so you get air-flow through it. On a bus, I mount a 96 plate Mesa in the frame members under the bus at a slight angle, again so air can go through it. On an off road car (rail style) I mount it away from the engine and in a way that air can go through it. Size is what will fit where you want it.
So those are the three components. Now, I want to talk about the best way to make use of this. My engines are full flowed. Full flowing is where we drill and tap the engine case for a return line. We then plug the outlet portion of the oil pump and use an oil pump cover that has an outlet passage. With this, I also use the stock doghouse oil cooler. Here is how it works: 100% of the oil comes out of the pump and goes to the filter. This means that the oil is filtered 100% of the time. If you have a block off where the stock oil cooler goes that pumps out to a cooler and filter then it only filters when the engine is warm. Where is all the dirt in the motor when the engine is cold? On the bottom. Where is the pick up tube for the oil pump? On the bottom. As you can see, it’s a much better way already to filter the oil with a full flow system. The oil travels out of the pump to the filter in port, from the filter out port to the external cooler, then from the external cooler back to the engine. If the oil is cold, then the oil piston pushes down and oil is fed to the main oil galleys. When the oil is warm, the piston stays up and is routed to the internal doghouse oil cooler. Hey hey, pretty cool. Here is what we achieve: When we are running down the road at speed, the external cooler is working well and so is the internal. When we are sitting in traffic and the external is not doing much, we still have the internal and the RPMs are low so that it is enough. Make sense?
Read more on Full Flowing HERE
So this is what we do in Redding to make these motors live. Redding is really hard on air-cooled motors and after years of trying different things and monitoring the oil temp and pressure; this is what works the best for us and hopefully it will work for you.