Oiling system improvements

Oiling..... The achilles heel of the FA20. Poor oil pressure and flow has been the cause of many a dead FA20 whether it was bone stock or highly modified. There are a lot of underlying reasons for this but with some choice porting of oil galleries, oil intakes, modification of the oil pump cover its self, a much better flowing oil pickup pipe. sump baffle and a thicker oil we can achieve some huge improvements. 

For reference a log Abbey Motorsport took years ago on a bone stock engine shows the oil pressure on 0w30 at 95c looking like this

It shows the oil pressure dropping rapidly after 5500rpm down to 5.5bar by 7400rpm. We have seen these results consistently on healthy engines, as these engines start to get a little older, a little more worn out, missed services and poor quality oil these results get even worse and cause accelerated wear to the bearings and eventually failure. 

After lots of internal modifications and using a Millers 10w60 fully synthetic oil we have managed to achieve 7.8bar of oil pressure at 7800rpm with no drop off as RPM increases! 

Even with oil temperatures of 120c we are not seeing the oil pressure drop any lower than 7bar at over 7000rpm. This is using standard Toyota main and conrod bearings and a completely standard oil pump, I am using a Fluidampr crankshaft pulley to help lower crankshaft harmonics to keep the oil pump alive at these high RPMs as an extra safety net. Fun fact we also use stock oil pump gears in our 600bhp race car with a lightweight alloy pulley that is regularly revved very high proving that harmonics in these engines is not a big issue but it never hurts to over engineer these things! 

Speaking of 120c oil temps....Time to fit that oil cooler now running in is complete and we are on the final oil! We had an avo oil cooler kit laying around that was returned by a customer years ago after going at it rather aggressively with some molegrips to tighten fittings which has left some of the fittings looking aesthetically poor but he never actually used the oil cooler so it is as good as new and I have always loved the preformed fibreglass ducts they are supplied with specifically molded to fit around the intercooler pipework. Stupidly I forgot to take photos fitting it so below are some product photos!

Happy to report it is working fantastic. We were seeing oil temps getting up to 110c on a 1st through to 3rd pull which is pretty quick! Now we can do a 1st to 6th under full boost and only see 96c oil temps with only a 2c climb over the entire pull which is fantastic!