My truck already had a transmission cooler on it when I bought it, which is good the owner at least had a concern for his truck's welfare. It functioned fine with no leaks, but I hated the installation. Like most folks seem to do, the transmission cooler was installed using plastic zip tie thingy's that probably came with a kit. The cooler itself looked fine, but I don't like things haphazard and decided to upgrade it.
In retrospect, I probably could have used the same cooler and just re-engineered the installation, because the one I bought was almost identical to the one I already had. Oh well, at least I know the internals are clean now, right?
I bought a new Mishimoto Universal cooler from Extreme Terrain, item T547657. It's 12" x 10" x .75" thick, fitting nicely over one of the big openings in the radiator support. I opted for the passenger-side opening to use for my cooler, of course, because it was nearest to the transmission cooler lines. I make up a couple of brackets out of 1/8" thick steel strap and mounted them up, painted (the cooler arrived unpainted and shiny) the whole assembly:
What I failed to consider is the hood safety catch--that big-ass "J" hook that hangs down for your scalp to make contact with when you least expect it. I had the whole thing installed all beautifully and was happy with the outcome. A week or so later I noticed that big J-hook was hitting one of the tubes and surrounding fins every time the hood was opened or closed! I'm glad I only raised the hood a handful of times during that period. When saw the damage, I considered myself lucky, then removed the whole thing. I re-engineered the bracketry to mount the cooler to the driver's side instead. Here's the final outcome. If you zoom you can see the garfed-up area I was talking about on the lower right (but don't look):
To get the hoses to nestle in closer to the grille without pushing out on it, I scrounged around Lowe's and found a couple of 90° elbows to use. I'm happy with the way everything turned out with the exception of the 'pass-thru' holes in the radiator support. I used the holes that were already there from the previous owner's installation so I used them, but I was worried about rubbing and chafing. I didn't have any grommets anywhere near that size, so I just opted for a couple pieces of heater hose wrapped around the oil cooler line at the pass-thru location. I put the zip ties on it on both sides of the support to hold it centered. Those are butt-ugly and will be replaced with grommets some day in the future:
I opted not to use the built-in oil cooler in the new radiator when I installed it. Why would anyone want to piggyback a new auxiliary cooler on top of a built-in radiator cooler? The only reason I could think of was maybe a little more transmission fluid capacity, and I quickly negated that point. After all, how good of a job of cooling will a coil that's immersed in 185-degree+ antifreeze do? Besides, the coiled tube they put in the new radiator was laughable in length. To use it just seemed ridiculous to me. Instead, I just slid the fittings down and pushed the hoses right over the flared ends of the existing factory lines and hose-clamped them. I like it when things don't get butchered because it's always easy to 'undo' something in the future.
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