Well, now... it isn't every day in engineering that you can call the first shot a complete, raving success. This was. With the H-Valve removed and the proto installed, it took about 5 minutes of 1300 RPM converter stall to push Lola's CVT to 175F, then nearly 20 minutes more to push her to 194F. Within 5 minutes of releasing the stall, she was cucumber-cool again at 165F. The latter is what I was really looking for, proof that with the heat injection to the beehive halted, the Hayden and OE exchanger are vastly more efficient. Without the solenoid, the same cooling took almost 20 minutes. That means on the highway with many times more forced air flowing through, they should have no problem keeping the temperature under tight control. The testing took all day, but color me happy as a pig in slop.
The only problems I found were purely mechanical. The solenoid assembly wouldn't fit behind the fill tube and needed to be wormed around it to get into place. That may not be possible on the RE0F09's where there's more crap in the 3-pound bag, so it will definitely be necessary to notch the bracket and allow it to be "turned" in at 90 degrees. Other than that, everything should fit as planned. The lower hose to the existing thermostat will get cut back about 3" and the upper hose extended 3~4" with a coupler. The sensor will just require cutting the hose about 2" from the hive and inserting the tee.
These pics were taken looking through the lefthand wheel well with the cover pulled back. Once the bracket design is straightened out, the installation should be a 2~3 hour job. Ignore the pink and white wires, the pink was my temporary power jumper and the white was for a kluje-wired status LED that won't exist on the final version. I removed the solenoid assembly after the test but left the sensor in place, Lola will definitely get a permanent installation once the design is finalized:
Vis the accuracy, the Ford sensors worked almost exactly to spec, changeover thresholds were within 3F across the board compared to readings from CVTz50. The next step is to order a panel of "production" PCB's and see if I can find someone local to machine or plasma-cut brackets. In the meantime, I only need one of the two protos. If anyone wants to be a guinea pig and figure out their own mounting scheme, I'll part with it for the cost of the components. I'll figure that out if one of you wants it, but it should be under $100.