UR opinion, extra transmission cooler..
I pulled the grill on my (5.3 Liter, 4L60e transmission) Suburban to install an oil cooler and there's a factory oil cooler mounted behind the grill already. I traced the line from the return side of...
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intheburbs wrote:
Swap out your gauge cluster for an HD cluster, and you'll now have a working trans temp gauge. Use that as a guide as to whether or not you need to install an aux cooler.
I pulled trailers as heavy as 7,000 lbs with my '01 Suburban 1500, and never saw any trans temp that caused me concern. And that includes towing in the Rockies.
And yes, avoid 4th when towing. 3rd is a 1:1 ratio, so it puts the least stress on the transmission. Took a little while to get comfortable with the engine at 3000 RPM while cruising, since the truck had 4.10 gears. But I logged over 15,000 miles towing like that, and the truck now has 235k miles on it with the original engine and transmission.
I have read that the extra RPMs are helpful to keep it cool in the mountains. In my old motorhome I would keep the RPMs up on steep climbs and it did fine. Keeps the water pump moving water faster or something like that..
The factory transmission oil cooler looks like it's a good size and good quality. Better than the aftermarket one I bought, which I'm sure would still be fine.
