Mishimoto R&D: 2014+ Silverado / Sierra 1500 Trans Cooler

[Mishimoto]

Hey everybody,

Mishimoto is excited to announce that we'll be making a transmission cooler for the 2014+ Silverado / Sierra 1500! We always like to share our R&D; so, take a look at the first step in the process below and let us know what you think!

Layers of Cooling – Transmission Cooler R&D, Part 1: Stock Review


Back in the old days, if you wanted a vehicle for doing work on the farm, you bought a tractor and trailer. If you wanted luxury to go to your gala event, you had somebody build a coach and put an engine in it. If you just wanted to get to work, you bought a horse. On the off chance you were a wealthy farmer, who had another job in town, you had to buy them all.

Today, you can drive to work, the farm, and the Met Gala all in the same vehicle. And it smells at lot better than a horse.



Chevy/GMC’s K2 platform of pickup trucks and SUVs is a combination of every vehicle you could ever need. The interior is plush and packed full of enough tech to satisfy a 17-year-old pop star. Order one in black or white and you’ll have no trouble getting the valet to sprint to your door and accept your keys. When you’ve had enough relaxation, the available EcoTec V8 engines give you plenty of power to get some work done.

The K2 Silverado, and the rest of the K2 platform, is made so versatile by an equal amount of versatility under the hood. Much like the truck itself, many of the engine and transmission components are pulling double duty. One – or two – of those components is the transmission cooler – or the A/C condenser.



Like many work trucks, the K2 Silverado uses a secondary transmission cooler. Unfortunately, that secondary cooler is an inefficient tube-and-fin design. The trans cooler is built in to the top of the A/C condenser. This design saves the manufacturer money and saves space in the cooling stack. So, what’s the problem? Well, if you’re only concerned with what the valet thinks of you and whether your Spotify playlists can be accessed from the middle of the Sierras, nothing. If you want to bring all of your belongings on a trailer up the Sierras with you, you’ll probably need a better transmission cooler.



That’s where Mishimoto comes in. We’re starting development of our 2014+ K2 Chevy Silverado / GMC Sierra 1500 transmission cooler. We’ll face some challenges along the way, thanks to that cleverly designed transmission cooler, A/C condenser combo. We won’t be able to just make it larger, but we have a plan to get around that. So keep an eye out for updates and feel free to let us know if you have any questions!

Thanks for reading!
-Steve

 

[Mishimoto]

Hey everybody,

Check out the next update on this project!

Layers of Cooling – Transmission Cooler R&D, Part 2: Prototype
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The second post in any of our project blogs is usually where we show you an aluminum box that represents the outer dimensions of our planned product. This time though, we’re going rogue.

Sort of.

Our last post looked at the stock transmission cooler for Chevy/GMC’s K2 chassis. To recap, the stock K2 transmission cooler is a bit of a chimera. If you were to look through the grille of a K2, you would never find the transmission cooler. Unlike other vehicles that have an obvious transmission cooler bolted onto the radiator, the K2 trans cooler is integrated into the truck’s A/C condenser. Removing the A/C condenser from the vehicle doesn’t make finding the transmission cooler any easier either. Only under close inspection can you see the break in the end-tank where the factory separated the two coolers. Otherwise, the A/C condenser and the transmission cooler share the similar tubes and fins, but the transmission cooler is about 1/3 the size of the A/C condenser.

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If you’ve ever held an A/C condenser, you know that it doesn’t feel like a part that should be entrusted with cooling a vital part of the vehicle. They hardly feel like they can cool the refrigerant in your A/C system, so why would you want 1/3 of one cooling your transmission. You don’t, and that’s why we’re working on our replacement that’s better suited to cool a multi-thousand-dollar part of your K2.

Normally this is where I would show our engineer measuring up the space behind the grille so that we could weld together a mock-up and test fit it. But this time, we’re skipping part of the process. You see, we’ve been working on the previous generation of these trucks to develop our 2001-2014 Duramax transmission cooler. We had a hunch that we could adapt our Duramax core to work on the K2 V8 platform, and lucky for us, we had one leftover.

Our 2001-2014 Duramax transmission cooler​

Without a traditional bolt-on cooler to replace, mounting ours would be a challenge. We couldn’t just lop the stock cooler off the A/C condenser, so our engineer had to come up with a clever solution. We took a few measurements (you didn’t think we’d get through this whole project without measuring anything, did you?) and split across the shop.

Over in our fabrication area, our head fabricator swapped out his welder for a MAP gas torch. Our plan was to braze on brackets that would let us bolt on mounts. Welding on the thin material of the core would likely blow a hole into a fluid passage or melt the brazing between the plates and cause a leak. So, Mike carefully applied heat to a brazing rod and joined the brackets to the core.

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On the other side of the shop, the 3D printer was churning out a set of plastic mounts that would connect to those brackets and clamp the cooler to the V-shaped support behind the truck’s grille. Friction and physics would keep the cooler in place without having to drill any holes or cut anything on the truck. With the core installed on the truck, we made sure it fit with the grille and active shutters.

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Our next challenge would be connecting our core to the stock transmission cooler circuit. The odd design of the stock trans cooler would make routing the lines even more of a challenge than mounting our core. But, we’ll have to save that adventure for the next post. For now, feel free to let us know if you have any questions or comments and keep an eye out for the next update.

Thanks for reading!
-Steve

 

[Mishimoto]

Hey everybody,

Great news! We have another update on this transmission cooler, including temp testing data, and it's on discounted pre-sale right now! Check out the final post on this transmission cooler and check out our website for more details on the pre-sale!

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Layers of Cooling – Transmission Cooler R&D, Part 3: Testing

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Trying something new can be a daunting, especially when you’re changing something you’ve done well for a long time. In the case of our 2014+ Chevy/GMC K2 transmission cooler, the design of the stock transmission cooler had us stepping off the beaten path in search of the best possible solution.

In our previous posts, we discussed the design of the stock cooler that’s integrated with the A/C condenser and how we would be adding an external cooler to supplement it. We had our core (the same one that we used on our Duramax project) mounted behind the grille of our volunteer K2, but we had no way of getting transmission fluid. This is where we really looked to challenge ourselves and raise the bar for the quality of aftermarket coolers.
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Our plan was to intercept the ATF before it went to the stock transmission cooler. The path of fluid would be from the transmission to our cooler, and then to the stock cooler and back to the transmission or radiator. This would take a huge load off the stock coolers and help prevent over-cooling in the event the customer wanted to use the thermostatic bypass valve delete that will be included with our cooler.

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The stock transmission cooler is connected to the transmission and radiator with hardlines and quick-disconnects. For our cooler to intercept the flow of fluid, we would need to connect those hardlines to our cooler’s hose barbs. We could just slide some transmission hose over the stock hardlines and clamp it down, but the quick-disconnect ends weren’t designed to hold a transmission hose. We would still need to find a way to route the hose to the cooler. Not to mention, we would also need an adapter to go from the transmission cooler hose to the quick-disconnect on the stock cooler. Since designing an adapter was unavoidable, we decided to make it as clean and simple as possible.

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Our engineer designed two adapters that connect seamlessly to the hardlines. The first adapter has a female quick-disconnect on one end to connect to the stock transmission hardline. The other end of that adapter utilizes a barb design rated to hold well over the pressure generated by the transmission. The other adapter goes from that hose barb end to the stock male quick-disconnect end and connect our cooler back into the stock transmission cooler. Two small holes drilled in the plastic shrouding around the A/C condenser allow the adapters to bridge the gap between the stock cooler and ours.
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The cooler was plumbed, and it was time for the part that most of you probably came here for: temperature testing. From previous projects, we’ve found that getting a truck transmission up to temperature on our DynaPacks can be challenging and doesn’t always yield great scientific data. Road testing lets us load the transmissions more, but traffic and varying weather conditions often make getting apples-to-apples data nearly impossible. When we tested our 2nd Gen Ram Cummins transmission cooler, we developed a new way to gather consistent data that would allow us to compare the efficiency of our coolers versus their stock counterparts.​

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With the help of a vat of ATF heated to a constant temperature, an electric oil pump, and our variable-speed dyno fan, we began bench testing the two coolers. First up would be the stock cooler. Once the ATF reached operating temperature, we activated the oil pump and filled the stock cooler with hot ATF. After waiting for the fluid temp at the cooler’s outlet to equal the inlet temp, we turned on the dyno fan and set it to produce the same wind speed seen behind the grille of the K2. The inlet and outlet temperatures fell (slightly) and eventually leveled off. We knew that we had reached the thermal efficiency of the stock cooler; it was no longer able to cool the ATF. We recorded the inlet and outlet temperatures for the stock cooler alone, then repeated the test with our cooler plumbed in before the stock cooler.

Our cooler adds an extra 0.65 quarts of fluid to the transmission cooling system and an extra 3,000 square-inches of cooling surface. We were confident that it would be a significant upgrade to the stock transmission cooler.

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The data showed that our cooler was able to reduce inlet temps by about 10°F and outlet temps by a whopping 30°F when compared to the stock cooler alone. That’s a 37% decrease in fluid temperature. And while the numbers on the chart below won’t necessarily be the same numbers you see on your truck’s trans temp gauge, we know from our Duramax transmission cooler that the efficiency shown in bench testing should be the same as on-road conditions, if not better.

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Our temp testing confirmed that this project was ready to go from our engineering facility to your K2. With mass production under way, we’re excited to announce that our 2014+ Chevy/GMC K2 V8 Transmission Cooler is now on discounted pre-sale. Now is your chance to get this awesome transmission cooler at a deep discount and prepare your K2 for a lifetime of hard work.

As always, feel free to let us know if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

-Steve

 

[Mishimoto]

Hey everybody,

Just a quick heads-up that we're going to be ending this pre-sale in about a week. Now's your last chance to get this transmission cooler at the discounted price!

Thanks,
-Steve

 

[Mishimoto]

Hi everybody,

Just wanted to let you all know that the pre-sale for this transmission cooler has ended. Thank you to everybody who ordered, you should get shipping information soon!

Thanks,
-Steve