One thing is for sure.

If you have an oil temp of over 240 at the oil cooler outlet, then you need a bigger cooler.

I guess this is the easiest thing to check. Drop a tee on the outlet and screw in an oil temp sender and run the snot out of the boat and when the oil temp gauge on the dash shows 270, check to see what the outlet temp is on the cooler.

i'm thru rambling.
mc

Nope, you figured it out exactly. It is essentially a single stage external pump on a wet sump pan. And you described the routing exactly how I have it.

Ford Blocks don't have bypass's sprung or otherwise. The original wetsump pump feed is tapped and plugged. The aiviad adapter blocks off the outgoing oil allowing only incoming oil at the block's filter boss.

The pressure regulator is on the pump I have them at 80 psi cold and 65 hot. I have temp senders in the pan and in the thermostat housing next to where the incoming oil from the cooler is. Since I have two engines, I run one off the pan and one of the T-stat housing. They are different, but only about 10 degrees when I am running hard and almost none when cruising (at least too little to read on the gauges).

These are the biggest non-custom oil coolers I am aware of. Teague swears they are good with supercharged power far exceeding mine.....but they run raw cooling on their big stuff and the overall engine temps are lower. I also don't know if they run t-stats for the oil but I would guess they do.

two things strike me as unusual. First, the water temps don't go crazy even when I know the oil is screaming hot and the coolant exchangers get their raw water after the oil coolers.

Second is just how damn fast the oil temps drop when I cut the rpms down (and of course speed). Watching the gauge you would think the water wasn't on and just got going again.

On Serious offshore, MERPerformance was describing a cooling issue with raw water (if I recall on a TS Top Gun) and they ported and polished the intakes on the drives and vented the strainer to help. That is what got me thinking here.

I have the motors out for a non related repair. I took advantage of the down time to return the strainers to MM for retrofitting vented lids. I can also drill the vent hole between the two passes on the brass end to keep the air out there. If these don't help, I can port and polish my sportmaster pick up holes. If all fails, I can have American Industrial build me bigger oil coolers. They built the teague coolers and I had them build my coolant exchangers. As you know, these exchangers are very heavy even when dry, I can see why racers don't want them.

ok. when you say the regulator is on the oil pump, does it recirculate oil back to the pump inlet or does it dump excess oil back through a separate bypass line? If it recirculates back to the pump inlet, you may not be getting the oil volume you need thru the cooler. That's a maybe. The way around this would be to have the regulator AFTER the cooler, with a separate dump back to the pan. Also, I'm not familiar with the routing of the oil thermostat. The oil Tstat is on the filter block or is it on the cooler? At any rate, for right now let's stop focusing on the oil flow (although low flow thru the cooler will behave just like yours is).

Let's look at water flow.
You say you have 15psi of water pressure. Is this reading taken from the intake manifold crossover, or right after the raw pump, or what? I would be very interested to know what your water pressure is at the strainer. Sometimes a raw pump can act as a restrictor.

If you have more water pressure before the raw pump than you have after it, then you are limiting your water flow thru the cooler. If that is the case, a pressure dump between the oil cooler and the raw pump would allow you to take advantage of the extra flow that's currently being restricted.

On the other hand, your raw pump may not be a restriction at all. You may have even more pressure after the raw pump, and you might have a restriction somewhere else in the loop limiting flow.

Fluid flow (gas or liquid) is dynamic and changes due to different circumstances.

Porting your pickups properly will increase the water delivered to the inlet side of the raw pump. With the outboards I used to play with, before low water pickups, we put plates over the side inlets and used a die grinder to make a "ledge" to direct the water towards the pickups. Worked great, even with pretty high transom heights. With low water pickups, outboards on boats that required positive trim would sometimes lose water pressure at speed. With them, pulling out the ole die grinder and changing the profile ahead of the pickup holes would restore water flow. So on your drives, deepening the troughs ahead of the pickup holes will load more water into them. Also you can drill onsize holes at the pickups and tap short lengths of stainless tubing into them to serve as "scoops" (I'd have to draw you a picture, this doesn't come across right with just the words..). Once again, if the raw pump is a restriction, then you'll get no benefit unless you have a pressure dump to allow the flow to go thru the cooler.

It's all a matter of pressure readings taken at different locations to determine what is happening at speed.

mc

It is a recirculating pump. But when I examine the inside, the inlet and outlet are on the main body, on either side of the two pump gears and the pressure regulator is in the very back of the pump. I have a tough time visualizing how it reduces flow.

Oil Flow(just to be sure) Pan, pump, T-stat filter combo, (cooler If in loop) and back to engine boss. I am going to run out the shop and see if the remote filter boss has a bypass in the schematic.

The oil T-stat is in the remote filer boss assembly. I have added a picture of that. One of which you see the routing of the raw water line; Strainer, PS cooler, Oil cooler, Pump, coolant cooler, header dump.

I can visualize the tubes you added to the pick ups.

I honestly don't know what my water pressure is at the strainer. I measure it at the last component to use raw water, the Coolant heat exchanger on the raw water side. just before it dumps into the headers and out the boat.

Someone just P/M'd me and stated they solved the problem going dry sump. I hope he pipes in with more details.

When your regulator diverts flow from the outlet of the pump to the inlet of the pump, you are fractionalizing the volume of oil being pumped. In other words, the pump is actually pumping say X gallons of oil in a given time, but less volume than that is making it to the next component in the loop, because pumped oil is being rerouted back to the pump inlet.

Properly designed drysump systems flow (and cool) a huge volume of oil, yet supply the block with only what it needs. Your setup should be able to perform adequately for your application.

Let's derail this part of the discussion and go back to basics. After you run hard for a weekend, have you gotten an oil analysis done? Is there any chance you are scuffing at max power? Oil heat comes from several areas: Heat from viscous friction, heat from the sliding contact parts in the motor (piston, cylinders, cam/lifters), from the heads (combustion heat), and from VALVETRAIN. Valvesprings operating at the upper deflection limit of their design spec will generate incredible heat at high revs. There is actually a spike in the heat curve of spring material when a certain cycle speed (RPM) is exceeded.

There are variables in play all over this situation, and everything interrelates.

I'm just not that familiar with Ford lube passages, and I don't know if you are flowing enough oil to take advantage of the cooler --- wait, you already said that one of the motors takes the temp reading right after the cooler. Is that correct? If that's right, and there's only 10 degrees diff between the oil cooler exit temp and the pan temp, then let's stop worrying about oil flow and go back to water flow. A low oil flow condition would show a much colder oil cooler exit temp than pan temp.

I apologize for the rambling thoughts, but you're getting it as it comes off my head, not after several draft revisions.

gotta go for now

I appologize for hijacking the thread but what is the max oil temperature that you consider acceptable during extended WOT running (1.) in the pan and (2.) coming out of the oil cooler?

I do get skirt scuffing once I exceed 6400 rpm so I stay below that. They have redesigned my blocks since and have longer bores to keep the skirt from scuffing at the bottom of the stroke. I also have a generous oil flow up top to keep the valvetrain cool. I have added drain back lines to assist flow back. The pans are 15 quart pans with several baffles with lids and a windage tray built in.

I found a picture of the two heat exhangers before painting, not that the picture informs you of how many BTUs are transferred but to show how big they are relating to one another. The small one is the teague coooler.

I also loaded the schematic for the T-stat/filter Boss. The only By-pass I can see would be in the filter itself.