I've been driving the heck out of this thing for the past 3 years with no issues until a couple weeks ago. I pulled it out of the garage to get something and noticed a trail of fresh oil along the driveway to where I stopped it. I fired it back up and crawled underneath and sure enough a stream of oil was coming down between the pushrod tubes below the oil cooler. Oh well, at least I didn't drill a hole in the oil cooler this time!
I immediately ordered new seals from WW and they arrived this week.
Anyway, these little 36HPers have the old 8mm oil cooler inlets. You can use the later 10mm coolers, but you need to use the right adapter seals.
So I pulled the motor on this enjoyable 4th of July and got into what I thought would be a cracked or compromised oil cooler seal(s). But to my surprise both seals looked good and were plyable. The nuts seemd to be the right tightness and I had no issues prior to the sudden leak. Could it be the oil cooler itself? The block?
Anyway, the case looks ok around the mounting location but I don't have a torch to check it. Maybe thats a good thing!
The bottom of the cooler was wet with fresh oil, so it could be the seals were loose? Or maybe the cooler itself s bad. How often does a cooler go bad? I have many of these early coolers, but don't really remember which ones are, or were, any good.
Is there an easy way to check them? Can you just plug the inlets and drop them in water? Do you need to pressure test them? How do I do that?
Motor out
You can see how #3 and #4 cylinder were getting soaked.
Seals semed to be ok and were still plyable
Bottom 1/4 of cooler was soaked.
You can see the difference between a 8mm cooler and a 10mm cooler here.
Pressure plate isn't wet
But I've got something going on in bellhousing. Tranny fluid? or oil?
I had one exhaust stud pull out. Gonna need Chuck or Bruce in that!