Dealing with a bad trans cooler in an older CAT. Has made quite a mess of the trans at the moment. I now have the cooler out. Nothing about it looks terrible but....obviously she is a leaker. Due to the drama these things can cause, I am curious if you guys get them fixed? Buy new? Anyone do remans? I am not sure if the tubes typically fail inside or just the soldered plates on the ends? Due to the age and damage concerns from this failure, I am hesitant to puke too much into it, but I also don't want a shoddy repair that will come back to bite me.....
The Cat one will be reman
You can air-test it and if it just has one or two individual tubes leaking you can solder the ends closed. As far as your last question goes, there's no such thing as a cheap and good cooler repair. At least, not that I've ever come across. The best you can hope for is that you're diligent enough with the daily checks to notice milky oil or a rise in the oil level before it does any damage.
I have pressure tested it and found a leaky tube within the chamber. Due to that, I just can't solder and reuse as others may be on their way out. Any resources to reman these?
I've fixed several for Mack engines over the years without problems. Make certain they are absolutely clean with a caustic, or alkaline bath before silver soldering the tubes if cracked at the end joint. I never have soldered an end shut, it's always been a cracked joint which is easily repaired with a small acetylene "Turbotorch" setup for HVAC work.
I guess diving into my engineering pocket, I'd really like to know how and why! The failure mode is pretty important to me. All copper alloys like brass can suffer from embrittlement with continual stress from thermal expansion and such. I'd like to know if this is a "crack" or "corrosion" that caused this. I will admit, I am a bit surprised to see the failure inside the chamber and not at the end but honestly a good silver solder job is usually quite substantial. I tend to wonder if the coolant in the machine was ignored "forever" and went acidic. I don't really see signs of that on the ends but it is quite puzzling to me. I think I will try running a pig through the tube to see if I can learn more. Wish it was bigger so I could scope it.