Photo Essay - Fitting A Ba/bf Transmission Cooler Kit

[PhilMeUp]

The cooler, with mounting brackets.


Fitting in the car, in front of the radiator.


Crimping the hoses, before removing the heat exchanger. What does a heat exchanger do? It’s an aluminium box. Gearbox oil goes in one side and engine coolant goes in the other side. The intention is to use the engine coolant to cool the transmission oil. It does the job, but not as well as having a separate cooler at the front of the engine bay.

The risk is that the heat exchanger fails inside, resulting in coolant and transmission oil being mixed together. If things go really bad then this could result in a damage motor (eg blown head gasket or wrecked motor) and wrecked gearbox.

The lighter black hoses on the right are the transmission oil hoses going in and out of the heat exchanger. The brownish black hoses on the left are the engine coolant hoses.

This entire lot ends up being removed.


The heater exchanger. Coolant hoses have been removed, and the transmission oil hoses are about to come off.


There is the issue of getting the transmission oil to the front of the car, where the cooler is. Most people use the hoses that are supplied with the cooler kit, but this is where taxi mechanics will do things differently.

The BA Falcon didn’t use a heat exchanger, like the BF and FG both do. The BA had a radiator with a transmission oil cooler inside it. This also worked well… for a while. Similar to the heat exchanger, when the radiator ultimately failed, coolant and transmission oil got mixed together, resulting in possible engine and transmission failure. Very expensive.

So, for this job my mechanic got a set of the aluminium pipes that the BA Falcon uses. He’s used them instead of the usual rubber hosing. This is for increased reliability - the aluminium tubing will be stronger and more resistant to being torn open than rubber hosing.


Mounting points for the aluminium BA tubing being fitted to the top of the transmission.


And now the aluminium tubes have been fitted.


The aluminium tubes going toward the front of the car. The brownish black hoses are the coolant hoses - instead of going in and out of the heat exchanger (which has not been removed), they are connected together.


The front of the engine bay. You can see the BA aluminium tubes.


The BF radiator is different to the BA one, so now we have these two aluminium tubes sitting there, with nothing to connect to. We’ll get to that in a minute.


The cooler in front of the radiator. That black plastic to the left will be cut out and removed soon, too allow for the aluminium tubes to reach around to the front.


I bought the BF kit instead of the BA kit (which is what I should have bought). This meant that we ended up with a spare set of hoses that we didn’t use because of the BA aluminium tubing. The mechanic made use of this extra hosing by using it as a protective layer over the hosing that we did use.


He has then bent the ends of the aluminium outward (very carefully). The hosing is then used to connect these tubes to the cooler that is in front of the radiator.


The black plastic that was mentioned before has been cut and removed. The hoses have been connected to the cooler, and a zip tie was used to hold the top hose so that there wouldn’t be force between the hose and cooler mounting. You can also see how the spare hose was used as a second layer.


The mounting bracket for the gear selector cable had to be ground back to allow space for the aluminium tubes.


And that’s how it’s done. You can buy the BA aluminium tubes from a Ford dealer or get them from a wreck. Or, just use the hosing that is supplied in the BF cooler kit. The BA kit is a fair bit cheaper than the BF kit because it doesn’t come with these hoses (ie the aluminium tubes are already in place).

I got my cooler kit from Driveline Auto Parts, which is at the corner of Howe and Frobisher Streets in Osborne Park. If you’re in Perth their phone number is 9443 2211. They also have branches in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia - http://www.drivelineap.com.au/contact.html

[JETURBO]

Excellent write up mate