The time had come to put our engineer's hard work to the test, a bench test to be specific. The bench test determines if our final transmission cooler will be a stacked-plate or tube-and-fin design. Given the fact that our cooler is over double the size of the stock cooler, we're confident that either construction will cool better, but the devil is in the details. Aside from the cooling performance of each construction method, we needed to consider the pressure drop across each. The cooling performance of the stacked-plate cooler might be better than a tube-and-fin cooler, but if the pressure drop is too high, it will all be for nothing. To settle the debate once and for all we set up our bench-test rig and got to work.

You may be wondering why we're bench testing the coolers instead of road testing them. Road testing coolers is great for getting real world data when you can perform

Simplicity is often the key to great engineering. The
same can be said about Ford's F-150. The F-150 is about function over frills and
getting the job done. Our 2015+ Ford F-150 transmission cooler will follow the
same formula. Our focus will be on one key aspect: use as much of the space
behind the F-150's grille as possible. As we saw in our first post, the stock
transmission cooler only utilizes about 50% of the available space. To increase
that usage to 100% without adding unnecessary complications is where we'll get
the job done, plain and simple.

Ford was kind enough to provide us with convenient mounting
points on either end of the radiator and a hard pipe to connect the outlet port
on the transmission cooler

Ford's F-150 is a staple of jobsites around the world and apparently a staple of this blog. It seems we never run out of projects for the F-150 and with thirteen generations to choose from, it's unlikely we ever will. Our latest endeavor into the F-150 platform focuses on the 2015-2017 model-year transmission coolers.

On top of the multitude of F-150 posts living on our blog, you'll find a wealth of posts about truck transmission coolers. For some reason, truck manufacturers tend to underestimate the importance of their vehicles' transmission coolers. Stock coolers on many trucks are often too small to cool the transmission fluid during long periods of heavy towing, have some major flaw that causes catastrophic failure, or manufacturers don't include one at all.

In the case of the 2015-2017