First the hurdle. The factory oil filter setup is a cast aluminum housing that bolts to the left side of the block and extends up to hold the filter canister up near the fill cap. You can see the housing just forwards of the dipstick:
To run an oil cooler we need an inlet and outlet for the lines, but a traditional sandwich plate won’t work here because of the unique shape of the ports where the block and housing meet:
Conveniently, Keisler Automation has been working on a solution. Here is their oil reroute plate:
This plate has a pair of M16x1.5 ports to which I added the metric to -10AN adapters. It also has an ⅛ NPT port for a sensor, but I found its location to be too cramped beside the larger fittings (and the GM oil pressure sensor is M14x1.5 anyways) so after this pic was taken I plugged that port and put the sensor in the remote filter plate:
As I mentioned in the power steering post, the factory oil filter housing can’t be removed without taking the steering pump off because the factory bolts are too long. There’s no getting around this the first time, but when installing the Keisler plate I switched the two forward bolts to shorter ones – this makes it possible to remove/install the plate with the steering pump in place. I forgot to write it down but I believe I used M8x1.25x25mm:
With the in/out for the hoses sorted all that’s left is a remote filter and a cooler. For the remote filter adapter it was important to me for it to be mounted to the engine so that removing the engine requires as little disassembly as possible. I played with a few locations and came up with doubling up the filter adapter on the same bracket that holds the power steering reservoir. Here’s the filter adapter mounted up to that bracket (now powdercoated black) with the steering reservoir not yet mounted:
Here it is with the steering reservoir in place. The filter location ended up mimicking the factory location a bit. Oil changes will be a breeze:
Now for lines and the cooler. For the cooler I chose another Earl’s unit – same depth and length as the power steering unit but taller; 19 rows instead of 7.
Just as I did with the power steering system, in order to make the entire nose assembly quickly removable I chose to add dry breaks here. Staubli -10AN units for the oil lines:
Here’s the full system just before final install. I fit the dry breaks directly to the cooler so that the feed and return lines remained one line each rather than being split into two. Fire sleeves on the portion of the lines that are anywhere near the exhaust. The short line is oil plate outlet to remote filter inlet and the long lines of course go to the cooler:
Installed:
