Glad you had a good weekend!

Question for you tho.

You say without a block off plate in place you don't get much above 140 on oil temp.. this is with a thermostatic sandwich plate for the cooler?

If so, your thermostat may be stuck open. You should at least be able to get it up into the 160 range in normal driving with the thermostat. Especially on the track man, I don't care how good your cooler is or how cold it is outside, you should be able to hover right at your t-stat opening threshold (180 is the most common temp), not this 150-170 stuff.


For me personally, I have an enormous cooler, but it is physically touching my radiator, so it has the benefit of being able to sap heat from the radiator in low speed daily driving type stuff to get the oil up to a reasonable temp (like when it was in the 30's a few weeks ago and I drove the damned thing to work, oil temps got up to 160 no problem but never went above that). This is of course with the thermostatic sandwich plate.

All that said, if you are not running a thermostatic plate, that would explain all of this a lot better and I'd highly recommend you swap one in for the health of your engine.

:tup:


Sorry for going so far off topic there DR.

I am running the thermostatic plate. It may have gotten to 180 or so during track sessions as I wasn't paying close attention to it; but was certainly running on the cooler side. For certain though driving from North of TMS in Ft Worth down to Cresson, it never reached 180.

What's the best way to test the thermostatic plate to make sure it's closing? Actually if I understand correctly, it never closes completely, just reduces flow right?

Well, as you push it more it will become a necessity, but you *could* do your first weekend without it safely. It just means you'll have to back off the revs halfway through your sessions and not push as hard. Either way you're not gonna destroy the car, you're just going to lose some hard driving time. By the time you get to caring about the difference in the various larger sizes, the cost of switching out to a different Setrab core will be pretty marginal compared to everything else you're throwing at this hobby :)

Yeah short-tripping in the cooler months, you'll need the blockoff plate and you'll still need a little warmup time. Who knows in your particular situation and the weather variance, but you can expect something like 3-ish minutes idling in the driveway, then just take it easy on the throttle for the first 10 minutes or so on the road and by then the gauge should be up around 160 and climbing. Having an oil pressure gauge installed makes it easier - I use that during the warmup driving to know how hard I can push the revs/throttle as it warms (basically aim for staying under ~80-90 psi, at the ~100psi mark it opens the pressure bypass).

On those 5 minute trips if you're starting from dead-overnight-cold, you're probably looking at 2-3 minutes idle and then just staying light on the throttle for the whole trip. It's not ideal, but it is what it is. If you've already driven the car in the past couple of hours, it retains a fair amount of heat in the block though and warmup goes much faster. In the hot months it's really not much of an issue at all, and you might partially or completely unblock it on the street even.

I wouldn't worry that much about the thermo - even with it, if I didn't have a blockoff I'd often hover at 150-160 on the highway in cold weather. I'd guess your on-track temps probably spiked up to 200 or more but you didn't notice. It would be difficult to cool this car's oil enough to maintain 180 in a track session, even in the bitter cold you've had up in that area lately :)

And yeah, by default the thermo plate is fully open in all senses. At temp it should close off the bypass and force oil through the cooler only (not the bypass).

The Mocal units (supposedly) flow 5% as a baseline and then around 180 begin to open up to something close to 100%.

The reason for the 5% always going out is so that your coolers stay purged of air and doesn't have oil sit in there for long periods of time. The downside to that is, if the thermal load isn't particularly high at a given time, the cooler can cool that 5% of bypass down significantly which will lower overall system temp.

If you weren't sitting at ~180-190 on the track, IMO there is something wrong.

As far as testing, the way I have always seen to test these things is to boil them in water. Use a meat thermometer to keep track of the water temp as it comes up and around 180 you should see the thermostat begin to open up.

If you take the thing off and can see that it isn't completely closed (or almost completely closed) then I'd say you've got a stuck plate for sure. You can find a good quality thermostatic plate for our cars cheap on the net (well under $100) so if it were me, I might just replace it and test for effect, if you don't fancy the idea of boiling a thermostatic plate (my wife would have a fit).

?? Unless it's changed since I bought mine a few years ago, Mocal's plates don't work like that - although maybe that's just how we're using words :)

When cold, the bypass and the cooler passages should both be 100% open. Just due to being the path of least resistance, most of your oil will bypass the cooler, but the passage itself is fully open. Then roughly from 175-185 the thermo spring closes off the bypass passageway, which then forces all your oil to go through the cooler passageway. But nothing ever closes (even partially) the passageways leading to/from the cooler. In any case, if the thermo were stuck open he'd see higher temps, not lower.

Interesting, that's the other way around from my understanding of them. There's nothing that explains why he'd be seeing such low temps on the track then, unless it's a bad sender or gauge. (Or human error)

I might replace my 180 degree Mocal with the 200 degree one. If I were buying it from scratch and piecing a kit together I would go with the 200 degree one

Well, whenever I bought mine a few years ago, I asked the Mocal rep over the phone in detail and that's the explanation I got. For all I know that guy just didn't know what he was talking about, but he sounded pretty informed and legit, and his explanation matches the look of the unit's design and the performance characteristics observed.

Yeah even back when I did mine, I thought about the 200F one. The same Mocal guy on the phone recommended against it for some reason or other that I don't even remember, but... yeah, we'd probably be better off with it.