“Fauxbi” Oil Cooler Assembly w/ Proper Seals (3.0 TDI Gen2 2013+)

Did you know that literally all “OEM” Oil coolers (Febi, Nissens, etc etc), come from the same Chinese factories?
OK well now you do. What really pisses me off is when i see certain companies calling these oil coolers “OEM” but literally just importing the coolers for next to nothing and selling them at like 10x markup.

I wanted to do two things

• Substitute the lower-quality standard gaskets for my own better ones.
• Sell them at what i think is a fair price, where I can make money but still feel OK.

Some background on why I’ve done this:

I sent the gaskets on these “OEM” ones out for material analysis, and I found that they are all FKM Bisphenol-cured or in the worst case, a mix of organic rubbers (Nitrile) and chopped up FKM which is literally the worst of all worlds, and what they do with flash from normal gasket production.

This is very disappointing from large companies like Febi who should and do know better. I guess when you’re just slapping your logo on someone elses product you might not care enough to check.

Outside of extremely expensive types of Viton (which have other tradeoffs compared to organic rubbers), bisphenol FKM should not be used in hot water/coolant applications period. Don’t believe me you can google Viton hydrolysis. Or consult Chemours application guide. idk im just telling you what i know

Therefore I forced the Chinese to use my own gaskets, which are 1:1 with Genuine in construction and use the correct, OE material for this application.
This was a challenge because the oil cooler factory started beefing with the gasket supplier and i had to calm them down and no i am not kidding. I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in my time dealing with british companies but never had to tell anyone to settle down before.

Just to make extra sure, we did a run of 20 and ran leak-down on all with 5Bar Air (around 70PSI), before agreeing to do a the production run with gaskets.
Zee seal (captive) has a more rapid type of pressure testing done during production as well, for 100% certainty.