Background
I stumbled across this oil cooler while scavenging a local salvage yard for Ford EDIS parts for a megasquirt install. This particular cooler comes as factory equipment on UK market CA18DET’s. As with most things Nissan, there are a lot of interchangeable parts and it just so happens that I found one of these oil coolers bolted to a late 80’s Nissan Maxima. (I forgot to get the VIN number to verify the year and model but I will be going back to the yard soon to get it) Unlike the JDM spec oil filter mount , the UK inline oil cooler comes with an additional housing attached to the top of the oil filter mount that has two divorced chambers, one for oil and the other for coolant. This housing cools the engine oil with coolant which will help equalize your coolant and oil temperatures as well as get the oil up to operating temp quicker. It will also allow the addition of a thermostatic switch before the filter to create a dual stage oil cooling system. (more on this in a follow up article) With that said, I purchased this part from the salvage yard for $5.00 to give it a try and as suspected, the mount patterns were identical between the CA18DET part and the “new” part.
Considerations
This install is a straight forward affair with just a few minor modifications but I would like to note that I run a very minimalist setup so you will more than likely have a lot more lines in the engine bay than I do. Regardless, clean and modify (if necessary) the oil cooler as pictured below and then T into your coolant lines to run coolant through the unit. (If you want to run the simplified coolant path that I run, go here: CA18DET Coolant Mod Number 2 (From 10 Lines to 1))
