Heat-sink trans coolers. Who's got them, and how do you like them?

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Corrupt_Reverend

Corrupt_Reverend

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The more I think about it, the more I feel like I made a mistake by not installing a separate transmission cooler after my rebuild.

So looking around online, I'm seeing a lot of options. One option that piqued my interest is these finned heat-sink coolers.

Just looking at them, I'd imagine they'd work just fine.

More poking around online, and I have yet to find anybody that was unhappy after installing one. The closest to any negative feedback is just people who've never used them, guessing that they might not work as well as a normal one.

The simplicity is definitely appealing. Just a straight tube with fins and a couple fittings that ya slap on your frame-rail.

So who here has installed one of these things? Any pictures to show where you chose to mount it? Regrets? Praises?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Edit: These are what I'm asking about:

 
Just ordered a traditional tube/fin style cooler. Don't wanna play guinnea pig on this. haha

Still interested in people's input if you've used a heat-sink style before though.
 
You mean plate-style cooler. I've used them and like them. They are smaller and more efficient than the tube style.
 
oldkimmer said:
......................their 3 times more efficient than the old tube/fin style..............kim........[/QUOTE

X2. When I worked in the transmission industry, we probably sold 50 of the Tru-kool(made by Long Manufacturing) style coolers to every tube and fin style cooler. Tube and fin coolers typically are sold because of their low price, not how good they are. You should be able to buy the stacked style coolers at any of your local auto parts stores. By the way, B&M coolers are just repackaged Tru-Kool coolers.
Click to expand...
 
Corrupt_Reverend said:
The more I think about it, the more I feel like I made a mistake by not installing a separate transmission cooler after my rebuild.

So looking around online, I'm seeing a lot of options. One option that piqued my interest is these finned heat-sink coolers.

Just looking at them, I'd imagine they'd work just fine.

More poking around online, and I have yet to find anybody that was unhappy after installing one. The closest to any negative feedback is just people who've never used them, guessing that they might not work as well as a normal one.

The simplicity is definitely appealing. Just a straight tube with fins and a couple fittings that ya slap on your frame-rail.

So who here has installed one of these things? Any pictures to show where you chose to mount it? Regrets? Praises?

Thanks in advance for any input.
Click to expand...

I forgot on my other post to answer your question about mounting. ALL transmission coolers should be mounted so they are in direct air flow, which means mounting it behind the grill. Coolers will at times come with 4 plastic connectors that they tell you to put through the rad. Not the best way to mount them, as they can cause wear on the rad. Any cooler I've installed were mounted to the rad cradle. More work for sure, but much better than the other method.
I also think if you're only using an auxilary cooler, a tube and fin style is a poor choice.
 
what are your engine,trans and converter specs,maybe you don't need an external cooler.
Stock style is to run the trans fluid through the rad to warm it up.
 
Looks nice, but how well does it cool? Without a cross section of the cooler, you don't really know whats inside. It could be just a 2 pass tube and fin style cooler in a really nice casting. I'm not saying it's not a good cooler, just that you really don't know how its made internally. Find out what the GVW rating of this cooler is. Ask if there is a cross section view of it available. If you're only going to use this cooler, IMHO I don't think its adequate.
Go to www.trucool.com and they explain to you how coolers (transmission or otherwise) work. The cast cooler by the way is made by Derale.
 
The derale coolers have fins on the inside as well. I've spent a couple hours scouring the net and simply cannot find any BTU ratings. It's kind of odd because from what I can tell, derale is a reputable company. The most common application I've found is guys using then in fiberglass body hotrods and a couple camaros as well as people using them for cooling full hydro steering systems in offroad rigs. None of these people mentioned their results though. :/

My car is a '72 dart custom sedan with a lightly built (higher comp, mild cam, edlebrock intake 4bbl carb) pushing a newly rebuilt a904 with a higher stall converter (around 2300).

I canceled the order for the tube and fin style. Looking at B&M super cooler line now, unless someone has a glowing review of the sort that I posted a picture of.

I'm heading up to the mountains with spotty pretty slow internet so responses from here on might be a bit slow.

Thanks for all the input so far guys! :)
 
And cracked, I saw your suggestion for the m7b on another thread. Do you plumb them on their own (not using the radiator cooler)?
 
I don't use the cooler in the radiator.

I tend to buy a larger cooler than needed. You can always block off a section (Tape) if you want or need more temp in the trans.
 
http://www.coolingzone.com/library.php?read=493


Look nice, cant see effective cooling. Too little surface area, too much fluid volume. The plate style is much more effective: probably 12 8x1 double contact sided pates for a total area of 192 square inches of cooling. That finned tube has the surface area of the can plus the fins and the fins are not in contact with the can but for a thin width. MHO.

Look at link on top and get the slide rule out...

Fin efficiency where L is the fin height andnote that k is the conductivity of the fin material. A is the cross-sectional area that's transferring heat up the fin. Usually this is the fin thickness times the flow length of the heat sink. Moving air produces heat transfer coefficient h (remember the Nusselt number?) and P is the "perimeter" of the fin. The perimeter is basically two times the flow length of the heat sink plus two times the thickness of the fin (negligible for thin fins); think of it as the length of a string wrapped around the fin at a constant height.
So now that you have the fin efficiency, what do you do with it? The way to apply it is to use instead of just (hA) in the log-mean temperature difference (see March column). Check that for a given heat flux, the surface temperature increases when you use the fin efficiency; that way, you'll know you wrote the formula correctly. Refrain, however, from placing too much emphasis on what the actual fin efficiency value is. It's not a design goal, but a calculation tool, and possibly a diagnostic to help you figure out why the heat sink performance isn't quite as high as you'd like.
Fin efficiency calculator (if your calculator-maker supports hyperbolic tangent…)
Fin height L
Heat sink flow length
Fin thickness
Heat transfer coefficient h
Material conductivity k (default = 205, extruded aluminum)
Area A = (fin thickness)*(heat sink flow length)
Perimeter P = 2*(heat sink flow length + fin thickness)
 
I wondered about those too. If I needed one Id certainly try one or two.I would install a temp gauge and do a before n after.Maybe you could get them in a 3 or 4 footer and hang em on the rockers to look like side pipes.lol
 
Went with an m7b. Found a pretty good deal on amazon with free shipping and it seems everyone has something good to say about them.

Still want to hear first-hand accounts of the heat-sink ones out of curiosity though. :)
 
Boy, I was really hoping you would go for that other heat-sink one.Oh well....
Try not to over-cool.It could cost you a teensy bit of power and a teensier bit of fuel mileage.ATF seems to be quite tolerant of heat. Right up until it gets too much,lol
I havent had an A/T Mope since 2004, when I stuck a 318 in my FormulaS. I ran it several winters( Sept long to May long) with the cooler line just looped, no cooler at all. 904 took it like a champ.
 
I'm pretty much guaranteed constant triple digit weather every summer where I live and rarely even see frost in the dead of winter.

I'm thinking that I will still try out one of these heat sink tube coolers later this year. It's driving me nuts that nobody seems to have any real, empirical testing results for them. None of the manufacturers even have any information on btu or gvw ratings for these products.

I'll probably just make a youtube video comparing real results between the m7b and a derale heatsink cooler. Gonna wait until I get into those triple digits though. Wanna really put it through its paces.

For now, I just want something that will definitely work.
 


Old thread resuscitation!

Trying one of these, a 24” dual pass Derale. With my abnormal application, Ive running an 18”x18” FSR Racing aluminum radiator (for ground support tugs) which has a dinky lower tank trans cooler (not really sized for high horsepower vehicles) and I have been running a Derale Atomic Cool stacked plate cooler w/thermostat controlled fan. My trans temps always run about 20° or so hotter than my engine. I generally see trans temps as high as 205°-210° (maybe a touch higher) on hotter days so the Atomic Cool fan is running most of the time. Gonna try continuing running the trans fluid through the radiator tank, into the heat sink and then into the auxiliary cooler and see what differences there are. Goal would be to bypass the radiator tank but will try the three combined as it only requires one cut of the braided hose and assembly of fittings to plumb it in. Bypassing the radiator from the get go means cutting off a good bit of expensive hose to plumb and there’s no going back unless I buy the lengths I already have. Will see how it goes.

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I'll stay with tube and fin. Here's the deal. These are a HEAT EXCHANGER. There has been a lot of nonsense about flow and piping and whatnot, leave that to the engineers. A "heat sink" has to have some place to heat sink TO. Where would that be? AIR. How is it going to sink to the air without fins? Answer? Doubt it.
 
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