Oil Coolers

A while back, I had a conversation with a customer about oil coolers for his GTR. Just about every manufacturer that offers oil coolers makes at least one kit for the GTR. "which one is best?" he asked.

There are many ways to judge a quality of a product. For an oil cooler, the obvious measuring stick is the cal/H. It's an universal mesurment, and just about every manufacturer lists it in their catalogs. Other considerations are pressure drop, filter relocation, and a thermostat.

But what good is a big efficient cooler if the air just goes around it?

Which brings me to my point, and a universal law, that you get what you pay for. Perhapse the best oil cooler kit for the GTR is the Nismo. Obviously, it's VERY well thought out, comes with all kinds of goodies, and it makes full use of the core with some very nice ducting. Here's the bad news--it's nearly $2000. We don't have any cars with a Nismo Oil Cooler, so this is from the Nismo catalog.

A more affordable option is the HKS kit. This kit, pictured below, is $800 which is actually reasonably cheap. They kept the cost down by going with a sandwich adaptor, not including a filter relocation, but it does come with -12 lines and a thermostat.

And a side view.

I'm not trying to sound like a Nismo or a HKS rep, but both of these are very quality pieces that I'd recomend. There are, undoubtedly, other brands that make quality pieces, and even if it doesn't come with bolt-on ducting, it's not that difficult to fabricate something like that.

There's a feature that I wished all oil coolers had--a drain. It seems like such an obvious concept, but I've yet to find an oil cooler with one, so this is what we did.