i didn't have an 02-05wrx or STi oil cooler handy, and ordering one would have meant another few weeks of waiting because i live right at the corner of No and Where. I did have access to a Ver8 JDM STi engine to experiment with, but the coolant lines come off the cooler in the wrong directions, so unless you want to do a lot of major re-routing and add a lot of extra heater hose then i would stick to usdm models.
just to see if i could make it work, i decided to try removing the pedestal and mounting my oem 06-07 cooler flush to the block like the other oil coolers are. i knew i would need to do some bending of at least one of the hard coolant lines on the cooler, and maybe add a bit of heater hose to account for the new position.
first off, remove stuff. filter comes off as normal.
the threaded shaft that your oil filter screws on to is also a 'bolt' that holds the oil cooler on to the spacer. a deep 24mm socket will take it off. more oil will come out and the cooler will hang by the coolant hoses. find something to plug the coolant hoses with if you don't want to do a coolant change, it's a low point in the system and will drain your rad if the coolant lines aren't plugged when the cooler is removed from them.
the spacer thing comes off in 2 pieces, 10mm bolts hold the lower spacer to the upper, and a hollow 21mm bolt holds the upper plate to the block. it takes a bit of yanking to pull the plates off, there's o-rings in there keeping everything tight.
getting both plates off will show you the mounting surface on the block
at this point i had to bend the longer coolant tube on the stock oil cooler so that it would clear the timing cover at the front of the engine. i would imagine this is not necessary if you get one of the replacement ones listed previously.
the 21mm bolt that held the upper plate onto the block is the same thread as the 24mm threaded shaft that held the oil cooler to the plates/holds the filter, so the oil cooler can be attached directly to the mating surface on the block. check that everything is clean and that the orange seal on the upper end of the oil cooler is good and throw it on there.
the shorter coolant tube mated up fine with it's heater hose, but the longer tube which i had bent was sitting just a little short of the oem heater hose so i cut a longer length of 1/2" heater hose that i had lying around and all was solved.
the header then went on with no issues at all, the filter sits vertically and has lots of clearance around it. i did this install a week and a bit ago, put around 500km on and i've seen no leaks or other problems.
as always when changing stuff on your car, do it at your own risk. this seems to have worked perfectly fine for me so far.
hope this helps
-sean
