Oil Cooler Louver Installation (and Oil Separator Tank)

Date: April, 2012

So after wrestling with what I thought were high oil temps for a number of years, installing large oil coolers, checking vernatherms (and every other damn thing in the engine), adding a diffuser to the NACA scoop, an exit ramp to the cooler, and then discovering that the Dynon oil temperature probe was reading 25 - 30F too high, so my oil temps were/are actually perfectly fine, I found this winter that my oil temps (after all my improvements to cooling) were too low. Sheesh. In cruise at altitude, I was getting about 165F - too low, and that's with an OAT of 40F - not even very cold out.

After looking at what Bill Kastenholz did with an oil cooler slide cover, controlled with a cable from the cockpit, and then seeing Tim Lumpp's new Long-EZ, which has oil cooler louvers over it to close off air flow to the cooler, I decided to fabricate one of my own. I created a 3D model in Solidworks of a workable system, made drawings, and actually used them to fabricate stuff, rather than just winging it, like usual.

Here are some pics of what I came up with.

Along with one picture of the drain tank for the crankcase vent oil separator, since I was taking pictures of the area.

On a test flight, I found that the louvers did a great job of allowing me to control the oil temperature as desired - I leave them open in the climb and then slowly close them down to allow the oil temperature to settle at about 185F - 190F.

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