Hi! Rusty
I keep on reading about your trials & tribulations regarding your engine, what was the original problem?
Georges B.

Hi Georges,

In the previous configuration, I used an evaporator core for an oil cooler.  This turned out to be a mistake, but as Ed always says, make new mistakes, not old ones.  The best theory is that the positive displacement oil pump produces some punishing pressure pulses, and over time, it split the core at one of the seams.  Actually, it split two of them. 

The first was damaged in shipping originally, but worked fine for about 30 hours of mostly ground running. It then started to leak at one of the seams, and I replaced it with an undamaged core.  That core did fine for about 10 flight hours, until I was on my way home from the first cross country in the plane. 

The core split open at about 6000 feet, and nearly full throttle.  Lot's of smoke, oil, and probably some flames that I didn't see on the exhaust.  The result was a dead stick landing at a Navy helicopter training field on a Sunday.  There wasn't any damage as a result of fire, or landing, but the engine was trashed from running without oil for a handful of seconds at high throttle. 

About $2500, and 4 months later, here I am, but with a real oil cooler :-)