As most folks know, we have issues with keeping the oil pump’s pickup submerged in left sweepers. The pump’s pick up port is on the left and at high rpm our oil level can get quite low. Add a g of lateral loading and it’s easy to imagine how the pump’s port can become uncovered and then it sucks air.
Grab your spare oil pan. Imagine the oil pump pick up in it, with it’s port to the driver’s side… Now imagine only 1" of oil in the sump, which totally happens, if only briefly in extended 4th gear accelerations. Now imagine the oil level at 45deg, piling up on the passenger side, and you can totally see how the pump’s pickup can become uncovered.
Most folks know to put in an extra quart. But that only buys you 5mm of oil. There’s a thread here somewhere about installing a little door on the driver’s side sump in the oil pan. That little door is an iX part. But what you can also do is tighten up your oil pan baffle.
All the baffles that are sold are leaky as heck. They don’t seal well and they don’t seal the rear of the sump hardly at all. What I tried to do is see how much hole the baffle really needed to get the oil pump’s pickup thru the baffle.
After playing around a bit, I decided that I might as well use plastic for my add-on baffle.
The first pic shows where I started. The baffle is obvious and you can see that it’s sealed all the way around so no oil can leak by. The AL is actually L shaped so there’s lots of surface area for the JB Weld to adhere. I’ve been using that pan for 7yrs so it would seem that JB Weld is right about their claim that their stuff is resistant to petroleum.
What you can’t see is that underneath that AL L shaped piece is it’s twin down below. There’s actually two layers of baffling there. Originally I was going to drill thru the pan to help fasten these baffles in place, but I figured that I’d give it a shot w/o putting holes in my pan and see what happens. With all the OP warning lights in my cockpit, I figured that there was no way I’d suddenly have an OP problem and fail to recognize it immed. And it’s worked fine all this time. JB Weld ftw.
Then I cut a piece of plastic and kept test fitting it until I could just barely put the oil pan back on. Here’s what the plastic looked like vs. a conventional baffle. Because I don’t have a block oil pressure relief valve, I don’t need the big whole in the baffle.
The piece of plastic was destined to go on top of the other stuff, but I thought that it would be useful to take a pic with it under the conventional baffle. This would show how the plastic baffle blocked more oil from sloshing out of the sump then the conventional baffle.
This is what it looked like before fastening the plastic piece in place.
So, there’s some ideas on improving your oil pan’s baffle. Just don’t button it back up until you’ve also installed a little hinged door in the driver’s side.
Later edit. Ah hah! I found a pic of the lower baffle. If you look closely at the below pic, you’ll see that my piece of angle AL is about 1" below the conventional baffle level. Note that the AL angle is not at 90deg. I banged on it a bit so it’s prob more like 75-80deg. This was necessary because the pan’s side isn’t vertical so 90deg doesn’t quite work.
