Texas World Speedway

ltullos

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?

Sh0velMan

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).

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wstar

?? 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.

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Sh0velMan

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)

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