Well I installed the cooler. I thought the mounting of the cooler and making the lines would be the hard part. Turns out getting the lines routed and connected to the adapter was the hardest part. I'm not really happy with how close the lines are to the headers.
Here is the cooler and Improved Racing adapter with thermostat.
The bracket hat goes down in front of the radiator. I tried to fab my bracket to follow the mounting bracket on the cooler to block the least amount of air.
The two homemade mounting brackets painted and ready to install. These are two strips of 1" x 1/8" aluminum. The top of one bolts to the vintage air bracket that goes to the top of the AC condenser and the other bolts to the core support. Both bolt to the lower valence.
One of the hoses. These are XRP pushlock hoses. I mistakenly believed when I ordered them that these had the highest temp ratings. I'm also using the XRP fyre sleeve rated to 800* (went with that since the silicone sleeves were only rated to 500*).
Here is a shot of the cooler mounted
Finally, the routing i did with the lines is a bit funky. I wasn't able to route both lines along the block as there just wasn't enough room with the headers. This routing gives the most space around the line from the header, though it has header pipes on 3 sides. The other line against the block is also close to a header pipe. At the closest point both lines are about 0.5" from a header pipe.
What do you guys think? I'm leaning towards trying to redo these lines with hard lines at least until well clear of the headers.
Results.
The Improved Racing adapter with built in thermostat works excellent. The thermostat begins to open at 180* and fully opens by 200*. Driving around on the surface streets I was seeing consistently about 195* oil temps (previous was around 220*) and on the freeway I see about 200-205* (previous was 250*).
Oil pressure is significantly improved at these temps. I'm seeing idle of 25 PSI (prior 18) and high RPM tops out around 60 PSI (prior was low 40's).