EZ Install for Shade-Tree Mechanics
When James Akagi bought his truck, he pledged that he was going to do everything that he could to protect his investment. There are a lot of products out there with false claims of what they can do. Being in marketing, James could spot some of them. Still, he needed to do his homework, and that’s when he came across Banks. “I am very skeptical when it comes to products that are made to catch more fishermen than fish, so to speak. After watching a bunch of videos and reading posts online, I decided to try my hand at my first significant shade-tree-mechanic project, installing a Banks Ram-Air Differential Cover. I have roughly 19k miles on my 2022 GMC Denali Sierra 2500 and did my rear diff cover at 15,500 miles. It was incredibly easy to do. The design, machining, and craftsmanship are all at a level that used to be widely seen in American quality. Banks is sadly one of the few big companies that still carry on this level of commitment and pride in a product’s engineering and craftsmanship.”
“I decided to get the Banks CoolRunner Oil Pan next. I watched the video on the Banks website and was amazed at how easy the installation looked, and it was! Let me say, it was actually fun to do! Cleaning off the RTV is what took the most time. After taking off the GMC OEM pan, wow…quite a lot of thick sludge was built up at the bottom. Imagine watering down dark chocolate pudding. Banks wasn’t joking about dirty oil being trapped. There was approximately .35qts of this still at the bottom which is impossible to drain from the ill-designed OEM pan. It is so upsetting that GMC would design their oil pans like this on a $100K truck!
“The kit comes with everything you need. I was shocked at how convenient they made it by even sending the caulking gun. The RTV they sent is more than plenty for the job. In fact, just to see how fast it dried, it put the extra that was left in the tube on a scrap piece of cardboard as well as some clear plastic to see how fast it’d dry; it dries in under an hour. Give it 3 hours, and it’s very rubbery. Give it 24 hours, and it’s super hard rubbery and won’t even retain a fingernail impression. Being able to evacuate the oil COMPLETELY and TOTALLY, I now have complete peace of mind.”
Full Video Transcript
00:00 your Duramax truck has a cancer and I’m going to show you with this we set out on a mission to improve the duramax’s oil cooling capabilities by upgrading the rear differential cover the transmission pan the oil pan and the oil cooler and while
00:21 the Duramax oil cooler has seen some upgrades throughout the years the oil pan has remained virtually the same a stamped steel cover but why should you care about the oil pan well as engines make more power they generate more heat too much heat and you start killing your oil to protect the
00:38 oil the truck’s ECM pulls back Fuel and makes less power to keep the oil from overheating so you end up with less power when you need it the most like towing at high altitudes it was our goal to keep oil temps down so your engine can maintain maximum power longer during our oil pan
00:56 research we discovered a potential engine killer and it’s in your Duramax right now there’s a quart of dirty oil trapped inside your engine and no matter how many times you change your oil it’s not coming out metal debris and all but here’s the interesting part during the initial factory
01:13 fill they put in 11 quarts but when you do an oil change you only put in 10 so where does that extra quart go it sits in here in the oil pan sump and I think you’ll be as Disturbed as we were when we discovered it I’m standing under a 2020 Silverado with a Duramax 6.6L L5P I’ve pulled
01:32 the dipstick and verified that the oil level is correct so we’re going to drain the oil put the plug back in and then pull the pan and show you the oil trapped inside so let’s drain this thing all right that’s about as much as we’re going to get out
01:55 of it let’s pull the pan and see what’s inside all right oh oh my god get a shot of that right there look at all that oil that’s trapped and it’s never coming out because of that guy that weld nut protrudes 3/4 of an inch inwards so you
02:13 always have 3/4 of an inch of oil but it gets even worse because the pickup tube is submerged in the captive oil there’s oil that’s trapped inside the pickup tube itself and that dirty oil is bad for cylinder Linings and bearing surfaces well the scratch that it’s bad for everything your skep
02:31 there’s no way that GM would allow this dirty oil to be trapped inside the pan for the life of your vehicle well I’ll prove it with this clear pan we 3D scanned the stock pan and made an exact duplicate out of clear plastic we’ll bolt it up
02:50 fill it to the proper level run the engine and then drain it just like we did for the stock steel cover okay clear pan is installed now we’re going to to fill it up and cycle that oil through the engine although I do hate to waste perfectly good MS oil for this it looks
03:14 trippy it’s like slightly opaque we can see the pickup tube you can see the mid pan you can see the dimple I’m curious to see once we start it when you mix in all that residual dirty oil how dark this will really get even with a fresh fill
03:30 on there what a trip okay so I’ve never seen anything like this before but what I expect to happen is we’ll actually see the oil level in here drop as it goes from static to dynamic and it’ll probably reach a point of equilibrium is all that oil is suspended
03:45 in the engine and we’ll be able to see that happen in real time as that oil is drawn up into the pump through the pickup tube I can’t wait to see this all right let’s go start it up that looks so interesting you see all the oil mixing the pickup tube the level oh my God you
04:08 can even see in real time the fresh oil mixing with the residual oil all right cut it okay so this thing is all cycled through with the fresh oil let’s go ahead and drain this thing oh my God the the stock clear pan has paid off so we have our trapped pool of oil but I bet
04:35 you there’s some in the pickup tube as well even when the engine is off the oil pump can create a low pressure condition behind it and suspend oil up into the tube which essentially means the static level in the pickup tube can be higher than the static level in the
04:49 pan right now but to be sure let’s go ahead and pull this thing and measure just how much is in there right good whoa whoa whoa whoa whoaa right there pause it pause it I want you to take a close look at this GoPro footage as soon as that pickup tube breaks its emergence the
05:11 trapped oil rushes out as the air rushes in to displace it keep a close eye on that okay okay I got to drop below these lines up still coming out of the pickup tube look at that suspended oil okay coming out I’m getting a bit of deja vu here looks pretty familiar
06:02 all right I am going to pull the gasket so I get a nice smooth pour I don’t know how much is trapped in here but more than I would want in my truck that’s for sure I think disturbing is the right word for this disturbingly large amount of oil oh my God
06:37 I think you guys get the picture we don’t need all this residual this means that if you have the stock pan you’re stuck with a quart of dirty oil literally forever it’s got metal debris soot it’s been oxidized air rated none of this is good for your engine and if you keep the stock pan it’s
06:55 never coming out thanks to the banks coolrunner there is no more dirty oil trapped inside whereas the stock pen has that protruding weld nut that traps about an inch of dirty oil the bank’s cool runner has a magnetic drain plug that threads in at the lowest point meaning every last drop of oil
07:12 is drained and since it’s all drained the pickup tube is no longer submerged air can displace the trapped oil and the pickup tube drains completely as well it holds two more quarts of oil over stock which slows heat saturation thanks to the increased thermal mass and while increasing your
07:27 capacity does extend your oil service interval once all that oil is hot it’s hot so what really matters is how you reject that heat and the fins are the secret sauce the fins on the cool runner are so long thin and close together that this pan has to be diecast like most aluminum wheels not
07:46 sandcast like every other aftermarket cover you cannot produce fins this deep and this tall with the sand casting the mold would break apart every time you tried to remove it and equally important we never use sand casting when making lubrication parts because because you’re never going to
08:00 get all of the sand out and die casting yields smoother walls which means quicker drain back to your pickup tube and as if sand in your oil wasn’t bad enough pp’s internal ribs are oriented in the wrong direction meaning it will impede flow back to your pickup tube and maybe even prevent debris
08:16 from draining during an oil change taking a look at the cross-section of the pan you’ll see that the fins line up with one another these are called Banks flow through fins we’ve lined up each fin on the interior with one on the exterior this allows for the most efficient Heat transfer
08:30 possible from the hot oil to the cooler ambient air you’ll also find flow through fins on our new Ram-Air trans pans and Gale will discuss this one in depth in an upcoming video this is all about radiant surface area the Banks CoolRunner has 47% more external radiant surface area over
08:48 PPE the closest competitor and also pp’s fins are misaligned so heat cannot efficiently transfer from the hot oil outwards to the atmosphere so why aren’t they long and in like the banks coolrunner it goes back to the sandcast versus the Superior diecast method the sandcast mold simply can’t
09:08 produce long thin fins like ours looking at the interior of the CoolRunner here’s a subtle feature that we’re excited about the stock pan is applied with a high strength silicon adhesive as the bolts are tightened the RTV creates a single strong bead that won’t break off and fall into the pan
09:23 obviously you don’t want silicone adhesive in your oil borrowing from decades of military development we incorporated a feature called called a squeeze gap the cool runner uses an OE style fulllength squeeze gap that runs the entire perimeter of the pan this machined feature prevents small
09:39 RTV strands from breaking off falling into the sump clogging the pickup tube and damaging your engine take a close look at this RTV bead you’ll notice it’s nice and consistent there’s no gaps there’s no isolated nodules that are going to break off into the
09:60 pan and clog your pickup tube not sure what PPE was thinking with this hopscotch dash feature the RTV will be thick and thin and thick and thin now that we have the PPE pan torqued up you can see just how inconsistent and thin
10:17 the RTV gets as it tries to extrude through a non-existent gap that leads to a high chance of breakage falling into your sump and getting clogged in your pickup tube another feature that will not be present on any other aftermark cover is this anti-cavitation dimple this sits right
10:33 under the screen on the pickup tube and The dimple in the stock pan isn’t just for looks it serves an important function by promoting a laminer flow into the pickup tube aiding your pump and drawing in oil and you know we love instrumentation and data so you’ll find an 8in
10:49 port on the side of the pan for a temp sensor and here’s a tidbit of science I think you’ll enjoy in the late 1800s French physicist Pierre Curre discovered that magnetism is lost at a critical time temperature in other words magnets lose their strength at a certain temperature based
11:03 on the materials they’re made of this is known as the cury temperature PPE advertises their drain plug as having a neodymium magnet to collect metal debris had they done a little research they would have seen that neodymium magnets have a cury temperature of 310 to 400° C but
11:19 they can start to lose magnetism at temps as low as 176° F or 80° C which is lower than your engine’s operating temperature this is why you’ll find strontium f magnets in our drain plugs they have a cury temperature of 450° c and they’re almost impervious to corrosion we set out
11:37 to make the best oil pan in the industry and I think you’ll agree we did it to get your Banks fluid cooling products visit bankspower.com or any of our hundreds of authorized installers
“Trust me, from what I saw that was left in the OEM oil pan, you DO NOT want that !@$! left in there to mix with your fresh oil. The Banks oil pan is the only way to get all the gunk out and to be able to start fresh with every and all of your oil changes, period. For me it’s Banks, or bust.”