Not necessarily a Ducati related question but i suppose it could apply to Ducs rads....the oil cooler on my 1988 Suzuki 750 Slingshot has sprung a leak and sourcing a replacement for that model is proving more difficult than i thought, does anyone know of anyone who can repair it,i've approached a couple of Rad repair outfits but they wont touch it cos its alloy/oil and they all mention something about oil contamination, dont really understand the process but i guess its not straightforward to weld. i could go for a new Hi-performance cooler kit for upwards of £330 but i'm a tight wad - although i might have to if i cant get it fixed.
Yep, alloy has to be spotlessly clean to weld. If not, any contaminants especially oil will get into the weld pool and cause it to blow through.
Where is it leaking from? I didn’t restrain the angle bracket on the bottom of my 900SS oil cooler when I needed to undo it to get my horizontal belt cover off. As you know there is a large rubber mounting which flexes. So I ended up wrenching the bracket off of the bottom gallery of the oil cooler. It looked to have been riveted on but it was some form of spot weld. I tried the coolant company next to Baines Racing at Silverstone and even the Vintage Car Radiator company at Bicester Heritage site who made oil coolers for Hurricanes that were being restored. All to no avail. So I set about it myself. There are 7? galleries on the oil cooler and I reasoned that there should be some redundancy so hoped that the loss of one may be doable. The hole in the underside of the bottom gallery was 4ish mm and through it I could see what resembled wire wool but ally not steel, presumably to efficiently get the heat in the oil to the cooling vanes. Trying to fix the bracket back onto the lower skin of the bottom gallery was not on. So I clamped the bracket back on and drilled a 5mm hole (the size of the biggest steel pop rivet I had) through the bracket and both lower and upper skins of the bottom gallery. From the back of the oil cooler I teased away the cooling vanes where the pop rivet was going to appear to establish whether the length of the rivet needed shortening (which it did). I used plenty of brake cleaning fluid to remove any contaminants and with the application of copious amounts of good old Araldite between the bracket and the lower skin of the bottom gallery and above the top skin where the rivet protruded proceeded to rivet it up. This effectively squeezed the upper and lower skins of the gallery together around the hole but I don’t think I have lost all of the oil passageway through the bottom gallery. because I only attacked the cooling fins at the back of the cooler you cannot see anything from the front. Finally, before I load the photos I read an article in Classic Bike abought a custom built Triton that had a bespoke oil cooler made by these guys. Kempston Radiators at Bedford their website seems unresponsive at the mo.
