Hey all, I'm about to totally overhaul my cooling system in my 1993 FZJ and I was surprised to find almost no threads on coolant filters. This is the only one I could find, from 14 years ago:
FZJ80 Coolant Filter Install
I don't really like this install for a few reasons:
1. It adds a lot of connections in an area that is already crowded and hard to reach
2. It mounts the filter pretty far away from where it is actually drawing coolant from
3. It is set up as a bypass system that tees off of the heater core system, which in a way is already a bypass of the main cooling system; I don't really see the advantage of adding a bypass system to a bypass system
So I pulled up Joey's great thread on coolant hoses and flow and did some thinking:
1FZ-FE coolant flow and planning
Now, my system is actually a little bit different, because it is a 1993; that means that the heater core return (the line coming from the firewall on the exhaust side of the engine) is not a hard pipe as shown in those photos, but instead it becomes a hose again to meet the housing for the main coolant inlet to the block. You can see what I'm talking about in this picture (stolen from this thread):
I was originally going to just replace it with the one-piece pipe, but then I had an idea; why not just use that spot to add in a coolant filter? I could just put a 5/8 hose on the end of the pipe, route that to the inlet of a filter base, which I would mount over where the washer bottle used to be. Then run a 5/8 outlet back to the inlet housing. Here's my professional diagram I made in CAD (and definitely not Microsoft Paint):
What do you guys think of this? It would solve all of the problems that I outlined earlier. It adds no additional connections to the cooling system other than those at the filter itself, it's very close to the source of the coolant, and it's a bypass system (if the filter clogged or leaked, your heating system would stop working but your engine would still be getting coolant). I'm still considering what filter base to use, and I'll update this thread when I make a decision.
FZJ80 Coolant Filter Install
I don't really like this install for a few reasons:
1. It adds a lot of connections in an area that is already crowded and hard to reach
2. It mounts the filter pretty far away from where it is actually drawing coolant from
3. It is set up as a bypass system that tees off of the heater core system, which in a way is already a bypass of the main cooling system; I don't really see the advantage of adding a bypass system to a bypass system
So I pulled up Joey's great thread on coolant hoses and flow and did some thinking:
1FZ-FE coolant flow and planning
Now, my system is actually a little bit different, because it is a 1993; that means that the heater core return (the line coming from the firewall on the exhaust side of the engine) is not a hard pipe as shown in those photos, but instead it becomes a hose again to meet the housing for the main coolant inlet to the block. You can see what I'm talking about in this picture (stolen from this thread):
I was originally going to just replace it with the one-piece pipe, but then I had an idea; why not just use that spot to add in a coolant filter? I could just put a 5/8 hose on the end of the pipe, route that to the inlet of a filter base, which I would mount over where the washer bottle used to be. Then run a 5/8 outlet back to the inlet housing. Here's my professional diagram I made in CAD (and definitely not Microsoft Paint):
What do you guys think of this? It would solve all of the problems that I outlined earlier. It adds no additional connections to the cooling system other than those at the filter itself, it's very close to the source of the coolant, and it's a bypass system (if the filter clogged or leaked, your heating system would stop working but your engine would still be getting coolant). I'm still considering what filter base to use, and I'll update this thread when I make a decision.