Trans cooler bypass ?

I was at the local parts store yesterday and there was a guy buying a new radiator for his 06 tacoma. Another victim of the pink milkshake nightmare. He thinks he might be able to save the transmission so I wished him luck.
My 05 has the towing package even though I don't tow much with it and I've been thinking of bypassing the cooler in the radiator. Is it as simple as connecting the two hoses together? What is used to connect them?

Any thoughts or input would be appreciated.

 

You need to buy an aftermarket transmission cooler and mount it in the air stream. Pretty cheap project.

I've often considered thus, but my rad s seem to experience road damage before the internals go bad, so I just replace the rad s with new and move on.

 

Why not repair your factory rad?
On initial start up in the morning , the transmission uses the heat generated from the engine to warm the transmission .
If it snows where you live , consider keeping the factory rad in place .

 

Giving this more thought, I think you would be gaining the same insurance against the "pink milkshake" by just changing out the old radiator. The cost would be the same and no bracket fabrication would be needed.

I've had no issues with aftermarket rads.

 

Personally I plan to just replace my radiator pre-emptively at somewhere between 8 and 10 years. It will eventually need to be replaced regardless and doing it early is low cost insurance against the milkshake. Hell given the recommended first change interval for the coolant I'll probably just replace the whole dang radiator along with the coolant! The milkshake seems pretty rare in the Tacoma, but at an amortized cost of say less than $40 for early radiator replacement why risk the transmission.

 

You can buy something like this from your local car parts store:



However, I don't know if the aux trans cooler that comes with the towing package is sufficient on its own. You must monitor trans fluid temp with a scan tool while driving.

Conservative rule of thumb is to just replace the radiator at 10 years. I plan to do just that when the time comes. I will probably replace a bunch of other cooling system items (water pump, thermostat, radiator hoses, belt) at the same time, as I will be hitting just around 100k miles at that point.

 

Replacing the radiator seems like a good idea since mine is original, (12 years old now) .
Rockauto sells a Denso replacement for $73. I had no idea that they were that cheap!
I'm glad I asked about this, you guys pointed me in the right direction!

 

Just bought mine today from rock auto, along with all the cooling system goodies. Just found a water pump leak today while cleaning my maf and t.b. got 100k and 11 years out of the factory stuff though.