[Verdoro 68]

While everyone was watching football, I spent my Thanksgiving in the garage. It took me a little bit of trial and error but I ended up getting the cooler mounted. The Derale 33602 (9.75 in. x 6.25in) is a little on the small side, but it was as big as I could fit.

I originally tried to mount the cooler closer to the center of the car near the hood latch/horn bracket with the ports facing the passenger side.There wasn't enough room to run the lines with the headlight vacuum canister in the way, so I flipped the cooler so the ports faced the driver side and mounted it favoring the passenger side. I made little L-shaped brackets out of stock steel to mount it to the underside of the core support. I bent new steel lines that run between the a/c drier and core support and run along the bottom of the a/c condenser.

I thought I could bend the tubes in one piece with no splices, but I couldn't fish the lines around the radiator so I ended up splicing them under the condenser. I cut the factory return line right before I bent up to the radiator and spliced in my new return line from the cooler similar to how it's shown in the Olds diagram above. It looks a little clunky to me, so I may go back and see if I can refine it. The length of tube I needed for the clamp on the flaring tool limited how short I could make my tubes after the bends. I also probably need a couple tubing mounts to secure the new trans lines.

I discovered that I had my cooling lines installed backwards on the trans. The top line on the radiator was going to the bottom port on the trans and vice versa. That might have been part of my problem, so I fixed those when I put everything back together.

Anyway, here's where I ended up.