I finally got the oil cooler mounted. The first step was to trim the wheel well liner so that I would know where to locate the oil cooler. The flange that goes against the body needed a lot trimming! Fitment was complicated by the air jacks and the liner was in an out of the car at least 20 times to get it right.
I bought a MHX-520 oil cooler and a MHX-520-FSS shroud with mounted SPAL fan from Improved Racing. The cooler has a high-quality, made-in-USA core and the shroud has four rubber grommet vibration isolators that are very similar to the ones that I used on the intercooler brackets.
I designed the upper and lower brackets to achieve the following:
Allow the body to be removed / installed without touching anything
Robust without adding too much weight
Provide upper and lower mounting points for the rear tire liner
Stiffen the bottom body flange in front the rear tire
Cover the fan, the lower backside of the tire liner and the fiberglass body
Provide mounting points for a panel that will eventually cover the upper backside of the tire liner
Look cool — because that’s the way that I roll LOL
I made the brackets out of 6” wide x 4” tall x 1/4” thick 90-degree aluminum (the structural stuff with a fillet on the inside corner). When the three-foot-long piece arrived in the mail I thought “that’s bigger and heavier than I thought!” After rough cutting it with a bandsaw, I used an end mill to clean up the edges. I then used a 3/4” end mill to cut six slots in the top and two in the vertical face. The slots on the top were milled parallel to the 2” x 2” chassis rail (62.5 degrees) to give it a custom appearance. This significantly lightened the piece and created a lot of chips!
Having enough of the fancy slots, the bottom bracket just got two big windows.
Each bracket has 1/4” screws that mount through the 2” x 2”, a 1/8” aluminum backer plate, a washer and a nyloc. The backer plates are held in place with a 10-24 button head. The vertical support rod was made from 5/8” stainless tube with M8 stainless flange nuts welded into the ends. The result is a very robust structure.
In the future, I’ll fabricate mounting tabs for the liner, a closeout panel to hide the upper portion of the wheel well liner and a bracket to stiffen the lower body flange in front of the rear tire.