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After almost 10 years of using a Corksport FMIC kit on my turbo-swapped 'vert, I was ready to try something else. I wanted to improve the turbo response by minimizing the intercooler and plumbing volume (the lower the volume to compress, the faster the response to planting the throttle), and I wanted to be able to re-install the front bumper beam which wasn't possible with the Corksport FMIC. My constraints for this were basically "no welding" and "under $1000", which ruled out a V-mount IC. Eventually, I settled on a set of water to air components from FrozenBoost.com, who I definitely have to recommend for their customer service and posting all the dimensions of their products online.
For the lowest intake volume, the best spot for the intercooler would need to be right on top of the engine in the same spot as the factory turbo intercooler. Since there is no real need for airflow right at the intercooler, it meant that I could keep the stock aluminum 'vert hood (no scoop), as long as the intercooler was thin enough and could be mounted close enough to the top of the engine. Based on where the compressor outlet and TB inlet were, after a bit of cardboard mock-up to check hood clearance (its tight), the Type 8 intercooler (3.5" thick core) seemed to be the best fit since it has offset air inlet & outlets. This IC was only spec'ed for about 350 hp on the website, which should be OK for my plans with this car (about 350-400 hp max, I think I'm around 300 now).
Here it is, mocked up in place:
By using reducing couplers on the inlet and outlet, 2" tubing straight off the BOV tube, and 2.25" tubing and 135 degree coupler cut down a bit, it was possible to piece together a fairly smooth and much lower volume air path to get to the original throttle body elbow. All I need on this side are a few pieces of bent aluminum bar-stock to hold the IC in place and mount to the engine & UIM.
Moving on to the heat exchanger, this would need to fit in the front of the car, before the radiator and oil cooler so that it will get the coolest air. The AC condenser has been removed from the car many years ago, so I don't need to worry about competing with that either. FrozenBoost had options that were more square, similar to a typical radiator, or much more rectangular like our oil coolers. I wanted to do minimal cutting of the radiator support (none if possible), and absolutely no structural cutting to get it to fit, and I wanted to use this heat exchanger basically as a large capacity tank to prevent water temps from changing too quickly, and to provide a constant head of water to the pump, which should ideally have its inlet lower than the heat exchanger outlet. This way I could avoid having to get another tank, as I don't intend on using it to dump ice into. Basically, these set of criteria meant that I was looking at something similar to the oil cooler, sitting above it (and above the round tube that braces the front chassis legs in front of the radiator). The two options were the Type 101 with a 3.5" thick core and the Type 118 with a 2" core. Since I anticipate being marginal on the intercooler's power capacity, and don't mind the additional water capacity in the heat exchanger to avoid a tank, the thicker Type 101 looked ideal for the extra volume and residence time (more cooling) of water. 26" wide would be very tight between the sides of the radiator support, especially with fittings, but essentially it looked like the only option.
I ordered the 600 hp kit on the frozenboost site, with the specific IC and heat exchanger (the 350 hp kit didn't offer the bigger heat exchanger), added the remote fill cap, and omitted the fan for the heat exchanger. Alongside this project I was installing a Taurus 2-speed e-Fan, so I should just be able to trigger that if the heat exchanger temperatures get too high. I originally ordered their "Rule" bait pump, but was very disappointed with the flow - more on this in a later post - so I eventually ordered the Bosch Cobra pump. You can save yourself some time and money by just getting this pump to begin with, since they offer it as an add-on option for their kits. I also got a variety of tubing bends and couplers to piece together the rest of the intake system. Once the heat exchanger arrived, it was time to try to fit it into the area over the oil cooler... no going back now!
Basically, most of the structure for the battery vent on the drivers side needed to be cut out to make room for the fittings, and the bungs for the fittings themselves got cut down and re-tapped so that the fittings won't protrude as far.
The final cut looks like this, from the front first, then from the engine bay:
And with the heat exchanger test-fit:
This arrangement will have 90 deg elbows in both of the heat exchanger bungs, with the bottom bung pointing straight down as the outlet to the pump mounted lower down, and a 90 deg elbow in the top bung pointing backwards into the engine bay to connect up directly to the intercooler outlet. There is also room to run the pump outlet hose back through the same hole to go back towards the engine. I'll need to make some block-off panels to close up the rest of the hole and help keep the cold air up in the front of the car, as well as the brackets for holding things in place, but conceptually most of the work for the components and routing is done.
The heat exchanger had 4 tabs welded onto it, 2 on top & 2 on bottom, so essentially I just needed to pick these up and connect them to different spots on the chassis. Using some aluminum L-channel material, I made a span to go between the top two brackets, and pick up one of the existing threaded holes on the upper radiator support. The other hole I had to drill in a symmetric position. You can tell that the heat exchanger is offset to the pass side slightly to make room for the fittings on the driver's side. Similarly, some L-channel is run between two existing threaded holes in the radiator support that were unused - I don't know what they originally held, but they appeared to have never been used; the threads were still painted.
I needed to use another small section of L-channel bolted to the main one to pick up the threaded nut on the drivers side, since it was lower than the one on the pass side. The top bracket and the downward bent piece of the upper radiator support also needed to be bent out slightly to match the angle of the radiator and heat exchanger, since they're tilted with respect to the top surface of the upper radiator support.
View from the top & front:
To get the hood latch to fit again, I needed to both cut away some of the bracket, and do a little percussive manipulation of the top row of the intercooler (read: bent it down slightly with a hammer).
This should allow plenty of room for adjustment and slight flexing. I still need to remove the heat exchanger again to flush it of metal shavings from tapping it further and add some rubber bushings inside the holes in the tabs to try to provide some isolation from chassis flex. I'd also like to cut some speed-holes in that lower L-channel, because as it currently sits it's blocking about an inch of the radiator height. I'll also need to add lock-tite, anti-seize, and sealing compound to the various fasteners and water fittings, but overall I'm very happy with the final fitment. To get it in or out, it definitely requires that the radiator be removed, but thats a much easier task now with the E-fan.
Finally, the power-side wiring diagram for all these changes that I used. This is based on an ABS relay box out of a mid-90s Lexus GS300 that I saw in the junkyard. It was ideal because the ABS relays were fused for 40 amps (as far as I could tell anyway), there were 3 high power relays in there (two of which would be for the Taurus e-Fan, one for the water-to-air intercooler pump), and one low-power relay which i don't currently have a use for (but I'm sure I'll find a use eventually).
As part of the Taurus e-Fan install, I put a BMW 2-channel thermal switch in the thermostat neck as a fail-safe mechanical switch if the Teensy (Arduino-based controller) stopped working. That is what is shown in these wiring diagrams as switching the e-Fan relays. For reference, this switch is a 2-stage BMW thermo-switches that would trigger at 90 & 98 C, with a similar switch (physically identical) that triggers at 80 & 88 C in this thread. Since the threading was very similar to the single switch hole in the S4 thermostat neck, the connectors and pins were available new, and the ranges sounded about right, I got a few of them to play with. These would also make a good stand-alone solution for turning on & off the e-Fan speeds without resorting to any Arduino programming/circuit building.
Anyway, the BMW thermo-switch that I used has two temperature switches inside, one at 90C and the other at 98C that switch their respective wires to ground above that temperature, so those wires directly go to the blue solenoid for the e-fan low speed & the green solenoid for e-fan high. Since the switch is "dumb", meaning that both "low" and "high" will be switched on whenever "high" is on, and in testing the fan seemed to blow harder when only "high" was energized (instead of sending power to both "low" and "high"), i built that switching logic into the ABS solenoid box. When the "High" green solenoid is not energized (as shown in the diagram), it is sending +12V from the battery to the coil of the "low" blue solenoid. When the thermo-switch "low" gets triggered, the other side of the blue solenoid coil will see ground, and the fan will turn on "low". When "high" gets triggered, the green solenoid will switch +12V from the contact going to the blue solenoid to the contact going to the "High" wire on the e-fan, turning on the "high" speed while turning off the blue solenoid, even though the "low" coil is still grounded by the thermoswitch. Additionally, the "high" green solenoid is taking its +12V from the switched ignition power, so "high" speed can only be engaged when the engine is running. "Low" can be on at any time, even with the car off. I don't know if this will cause a problem yet... I don't expect so since even though the water pump won't be circulating coolant when the engine is off, natural convection in the radiator will tend to keep coolant moving a little bit (as the coolant cools, it will become more dense and fall in the radiator, pushing hot coolant through the system and into the top of the radiator to keep a small amount of flow going). Also, the e-fan is blowing directly on the thermostat neck, which should help cool that part down too (which is where the thermo-switch is located). Either way, its something I'll need to keep an eye on once the car is running. Also, all of the switching (whether by the arduino, manual switches, or BMW thermo-switch) is done on the low-current signal side, not on the high-current power side, so all the components should be much more reliable. This means that ground will be present on the switched end of the coil whenever they are switched by any means, which will light the LEDs shown under the teensy controller when that relay is signaled to be energized, regardless of the source (thermoswitch, Teensy, or manual switch).
One thing to note, the relays in the Lexus fuse box are completely stock, but I did need to move a couple wires around to achieve the wiring that is shown in the image. I believe the biggest changes were in connecting the "Low" speed +12V coil signal to the "High" speed relay, and running 12V sources back to the electrical buss at the end of the box, but I would recommend checking all the wiring with a multimeter to be sure.
Another note is that for some reason, when the ignition is turned to "Acc" (the teensy is powered up & 5V is going to the diodes), both the Pump and the High diode are lit, despite the respective outputs not being on by any of the switching sources. My guess is there is some type of internal fly-back diode or resistor that is there to bleed off voltage and prevent the coil from acting like an inductor, but under these conditions it is providing a path to ground. The simple solution is to put a diode that only allows current from the ground-side of these coils towards the switches, so that it doesn't interfere with the switches but blocks this spurious path to ground, although I haven't tested this yet.
Here are the brackets that hold the intercooler over the engine in roughly the same spot as the OEM TMIC. They aren't very complicated, just bent and trimmed pieces of aluminum bar.
In front, it is basically just a flat strip with a chunk cut out to allow the alternator adjustment. This sticks down and bolts onto a threaded ear on the front iron that is almost directly behind the alternator adjustment bracket.
The rear one comes off of one of the TMIC mounts on the UIM, uses some carved up L-channel to come across and bolt to the intercooler, then it bends down and twists slightly to bolt to one of the studs/nuts that hold the throttle body inlet piece on. On this one, the aluminum had fatigued and broken from all the bending and adjustment, so I added a few small bolts to attach the two pieces.
Now, some more on the pumps. I had originally gotten the "Rule" pump that FrozenBoost site recommended as a cheaper alternative... well, you get what you pay for. That pump was the cause of a few headaches. I got the system plumbed and everything connected last night and... it wouldn't push any water. After confirming this by having it suck out of a gallon jug, through the intercooler and heat exchanger, and pour into a bucket, there was no flow. Even when I unbolted it, put longer hoses on to allow it to hang down below the car it only pushed a trickle out - maybe a gallon a minute at the rate it was draining the bucket, nowhere near the 500 gallons/hr (~8.3 gal/min) it is advertised as having. Looking through the spec sheet further, it does say that the flow drops off to about 340 gal/hr (5.7 gal/min) at 3 1/2 feet of water (i'm assuming thats pump head pressure), but when doing my research I figured that would be fine since there is less than that total difference in where the components are mounted in the engine bay. Whelp, I guess I didn't account for the flow losses through the intercooler and heat exchanger or something too, because the actual flow rate was pretty pathetic. Turns out that 3 1/2 feet of water is only about 1.5 psi, which means that on the chart below, this pump's flow rate drops like a rock in comparison to most of the pumps specifically designed to be used as automotive intercooler or waterpumps. (8.3 gal/min @ 0 psi to 5.7 gal/min @ 1.5 psi) If its flow curve looks anything like the other ones on that chart, and it likely does since it is still a centrifugal pump, it is all out of flow by 3 psi.
All the dotted lines are based on measured flow numbers from RULE or Bosch for their pumps - they are both 12V pumps, but I don't know whether these tests were done at 12V, 13.5V, or what. Anyhow, the RULE bait-pump looks pretty terrible despite claiming 500 gallons/hr, which it can only do with no pressure. Add some pressure and it drops like a rock. As far as I can tell, the Bosch 0 392 022 002 pump is the Cobra/CTS-V intercooler pump, and the flow curves line up pretty nicely between Lingenfelter's testing and the spec sheet. One other pump I stumbled across that had higher flow/pressure capability was the Bosch 0 392 024 058. Its a 3-wire design with a +, -, and then one labelled "S"... is it PWM-speed controlled? I don't really know, but it looks very capable based on the specs.
So anyway, instead I bought one of the Bosch CTS-V pumps - these are pretty well known and have been around for many years now in other applications like as coolant pumps, intercooler pump for the supercharged Mustang Cobra from the 2000s, etc. If it can flow enough coolant for those engines, it should be able to handle my needs since I'm nowhere near those power levels.
Last edited by toplessFC3Sman; 06-28-18 at 08:31 AM.
After the last troubles with the pump, I went back and looked closely at all of the potential problems with the coolant loop - anything that could hinder flow or cause the pump flow to stall. Basically, this came down to hard turns that could kink the hose, places that air could get trapped, and making sure that the pump was as low in the system as possible so that it always would be getting fed water since it cannot create any suction.
The first one was simple - basically just looking at the hose runs and adjusting things and adding brackets or tie-downs as necessary.
The second - removing all air when filling - was a bit more complicated. Its possible to get a vacuum pump to suck all the air out, then pull water or coolant into the system, but knowing how likely it is that I may need to add water or disconnect things for tweaking etc, I decided to try to go a different route and not require a special vacuum pump to fill things. This meant that I needed to put air purge valves at all the local high spots to allow me to force out all the air when filling normally, which I could then close once they started showing water trickling out. The two biggest local maxima were in the top of the heat exchanger under the radiator support, and in the top of the intercooler itself since the fittings attached in the center of each of these. A look through mcmaster turned up these very nice, low-profile purge valves meant for radiators, but they would work great for my purposes since they are resistant to corrosion, pressure, and require you to manually open a valve (as opposed to many which require pushing a button, which I could easily see doing accidentally, or see it opening due to vibration). Its a very small thing, and just requires an 1/8" NPT thread be tapped or welded into where-ever it is to be installed.
I had thought that I would need an Al bung welded on the top of the heat exchanger to thread this in, but when I went to drill the hole that the bung would sit in, the end plate was thick enough for 7-8 threads, completely sufficient to thread the purge valve into.
These require a special square key to open and close, but due to the position under the radiator support, the supplied key was too short so another had to be made. Fortunately, an old piece of brake tubing was just about the right circumference, and I could bend it over the square end of a thread tap to make an adequate tool. A bit of drilling through the top of the radiator support, and now there is access to the top of the valve!
The same valve was installed in the upper-most corner of the intercooler as well to get as much air as possible out with a regular gravity-fill.
This meant that the hoses could be routed under the OEM battery location, since I don't really want to tackle the project of moving the battery - I have enough wiring ahead of me before I can drive Savannah again! However, the OEM battery tray will not work here since it completely blocks off the hole where the hoses need to be fed into the engine bay. I still had the cheap battery pedestal that came with the Corksport FMIC kit, and although I really despise the design (it puts lots of cantilevered aluminum sheet in bending, great for fatigue and randomly breaking), it was what I had on-hand to make work. Maybe I'll come back and figure another solution out later on, or just relocate the battery to the bins behind the seats at some point.
The last piece of the puzzle is dropping the Bosch pump a little lower, putting it below the bumper bar off on the side of the air channel heading to the radiator and other heat exchangers. This way it is always pulling water from the oversized IC heat exchanger, and will always be pushing fluid since all the air is out of the system. Some quick testing shows that it seems to be flowing a lot more than previously - I'll need to run the hoses back into the milk jug and bucket to get an estimate, but it seems to be a substantial improvement. The pump here is held with hose clamps to a piece of 1" wide aluminum strip that runs between one of the bolt holes for the power steering cooling loop and a hole on the triangular cross-member that the lower bumper support piece bolts to. I stuck some of the insulating foam in between the aluminum and the pump to provide a little cushion and vibration isolation.
Also, here is a pic of the Lexus relay box, and where it will be mounted in the car. It is a nice little self-contained unit, and I added a large fuse that I found as part of a stereo install on a junkyard car because you never want to be running power directly from the battery without a fuse - that's just asking to turn a small short into a car fire
Also, looking back through this, I'll need to get some pictures of the bracket I made to hold the fill cap, and where that is mounted too.
Last edited by toplessFC3Sman; 06-28-18 at 10:02 AM.
The last piece of the puzzle, at least from a mechanical side, is the ducting. This is critical to make sure that the air forced in the front bumper when the car is moving does not escape and go around the radiator and heat exchanger - its forced through it. Otherwise, you're going to be relying on the fan all the time to pull air through, which is going to be a huge drag on your electrical system, and it may not be able to keep up on the highway where electrically driving the fan can actually be detrimental to air flow.
Since we cut a hole on the driver's side of the radiator to make room for the fittings and pass hoses back and forth, this is the biggest place that we need to address with ducting and block-off panels. For some of the more complicated shapes, or where I wanted to have a more rigid panel after bending it, I cut the pieces out of a sheet of textured ABS plastic. Using a torch, its easy to heat up parts of the sheet and bend it into the shape you want, and when it cools off it will be nice and rigid in that new shape. It cuts nicely with shears, and drills nicely to put holes in for fasteners to hold it onto the panel. Speaking of these holes, I was just using some of the christmas-tree style push-in trim fasteners for this since they are cheap and all they need is a hole of a certain diameter to go into. Make sure to be careful drilling these holes so that you don't hit anything behind the panel that you're drilling, and plan ahead for access to these holes once the heat exchanger, pump etc are in place.
Anyway, this first panel is inside the engine bay right next to the battery. I cut up some extra length of the water hose, put a slit down the side, and wrapped it around the actual water hose to help protect it from rubbing and to better fill the hole. Then, this panel covers the "L" shaped section behind the headlight and onto the radiator support, with a small part bent out to hug the water hoses. There is also some window & door foam used here, like what you'd get at a hardware store for insulating the gap between doors or windows and their frames. This stuff is great since its very pliable, and comes with a strip of adhesive along one side so you can just stick it in place. I've used it before for filling small gaps between the radiator support or plastic panels and the radiator or oil cooler, and its done a good job.
Since this hole cuts through into the area underneath the driver's side headlight too (it makes it much easier to get the heat exchanger into place), that area needed to be blocked as well. This was a simpler panel, really just an "L" shaped piece trimmed to fit. This shot is looking right next to the headlight, along the metal panel that forms the driver's side wall running along the "frame rail" to the bumper support. This piece also has the window and door insulation between it and the metal since the surface was more irregular here.
Now, what is that blue and white panel to the left doing there? For larger sections, I used a yard sign for a local Greek festival, since the material is basically the plastic version of corrugated cardboard. It is two layers with lots of lines between them, it bends very easily along one axis, and free is the best kind of cheap! This is to replace one of the panels that directs air to the radiator in the center section of the car, next to the coolant overflow bottle, that went missing years ago. I had to make that panel in two pieces to get it into place and block off the side, but it also runs along the inside wall there to partially block the hole that we cut for the heat exchanger hoses.
For all your racing needs, go to St. Nicholas Speed Parts! I'm also going to use this stuff to make an air filter box to separate the filter from the rest of the hot engine bay.
Lastly, there is the Teensy (Arduino-based) controller for switching the fan relay. Since this is a whole huge project unto itself, I'm going to post that over in the Megasquirt forum since it also is displaying engine parameters from the MS. The simple solution is to just run a manual switch to ground for the IC pump relay, or to have it just switched with ignition. I had wanted to actively control it based on the intercooler water temperature (if its already cold, why keep running the pump?), but I couldn't find a thermo-switch that would close around 35 - 40C that I liked, thus the extra complexity.
Anyhow, as a teaser, here is the controller in action, installed in place of the clock in the idiot light display.
Great job! A W2A setup with a good heat exchanger can work great on the street. I used a Frozen Boost type 15, and a bunch of OEM supercharged Mustang parts in my setup. The only negative with W2A on a street car is that the IATs never get super low during low ambient temps. Once warmed up, mine would hover around 85F IATs regardless of how cold the weather. If ambient was much above 75, IATs would be ambient +15F. The stability and recovery with a heat exchanger were really impressive. I would usually see single-digit temp rises on a 4th gear pull. After 4 hours on the dyno with just one fan, IATs only ever went over 100F ONCE!
Good luck with the setup, it should work really well for you. It’ looks better thought out than mine and I had no issues.
Since I figured afterwards that it may come up, here is a bit more info on the Taurus e-Fan installation and BMW thermoswitch.
Basically, I wanted a fan that would be switched on only when needed, not one that was spinning all the time. Add to that the belt slippage on the coolant pump pulley once the air pump is removed (which isn't helped by the mechanical radiator fan), and the desire for a functional cold-air intake (not just a pipe and filter sitting where the original airbox had been (which had been evicted to make room for the FMIC piping), and I decided it was time to tackle the whole cooling system & intercooler air flow problem at once.
I started out roughly following some of the e-fanwrite-ups on RX7club.com, and settled on the 2-speed Taurus e-fan since the shroud seemed to fit well, the fan area was huge (so no flaps would be necessary), and it was 2-speed to more gradually adjust cooling to the needs. I've actually had one of these kicking around in my pile of parts for a couple years now, so time to use it!
The only real tight spots were where the rad inlet & outlet are, and the stock fan shroud has big dimples to get around the hoses.
At first, I tried to heat up a bit of pipe and use that to just deform the plastic around the inlet and outlet. That didn't work so well, so instead I cut out the two corners in a pattern so that I could flip them over and use them on the opposite corner to make little cut-outs.
After that, it was just a matter of making up some brackets from angle-iron & stand-offs to allow the whole thing to be bolted securely to the radiator mounting brackets, and cutting out insulation foam to stick between the shroud and the fan to prevent them from rubbing and to seal up the fan area.
To control it, I found some 2-stage BMW thermo-switches that would trigger at 90 & 98 C, with a similar switch that triggers at 80 & 88 C in this thread. Since the threading was very similar to the single switch hole in the S4 thermostat neck, the connectors and pins were available new, and the ranges sounded about right, I got a few of them to play with. The threading was the same pitch as the hole in the thermostat neck, but 2mm narrower in diameter. There weren't any threaded inserts that would bridge this gap, but since the pitch was the same, I could make one as long as I got the threads cut on the outside and inside started at the correct point.
This took a few tries with hand-tools on the bench, but eventually I got something that worked.
Liberal use of thread sealant and loc-tite, some filing and sanding along the top surface to make it smooth, and a nice big copper crush washer all work together to seal it up, and so far it does not appear to be leaking.
Wow, both your setups look so nice! You can definitely fit a larger intercooler in front of the engine there than I can on top too, which may be a concern when you're after more power. My only concern is that the radiator fan is blowing hot air straight off the radiator directly onto the outside of the intercooler - I'm still not happy with that in my setup and the potential for heat soak, but I really don't want to cut a hole in my hood and provide ducting for the radiator flow up and out... maybe I can just insulate around the intercooler somehow.
As much as I hate the fad of covering absolutely everything in the tacky gold tape, it worked pretty well on my intercooler. I had a smaller W2A IC before the setup I posted above and If I stopped to get gas, IATs would jump 30-40F once I restarted the car. They'd go down as soon as I started moving, but the heat soak was noticeable. With the stupid tape, it raised considerably less. There are other factors, like thermal mass of the IC and total water volume, but overall placement was very similar.
If you look closely, you can see a sheet metal baffle added in front and rear of the IC. Its insulated with some Bonded Logic to help isolate the IC wall from hot air off the radiator fan.
The system has been trouble fee for several years here in the desert. Intake air temps run 25F +/- above ambient and coolant temps run 190F.
BTW, that's measured on 105F ambient days. The cooler the ambient, the cooler the intake temp.
Topless/Shainiac, what are you intake/ambient temps at cruising?
Last edited by TRRAPLN; 06-29-18 at 01:47 PM.
Reason: at cruising
My IATs would be Ambient+15F, but once the car was fully heat soaked (car fully warmed up, sat through a few traffic lights), it wouldn’t really go below 80-85F unless it was decently cool outside. It doesn’t really get that hot in New England, but I’ve driven it in 95F weather a few times and it did great. My Coolant temps never went over 195F, but because the oil cooler was obscured by the W2A HX, oil temps would get 220F after a 4th gear pull. Making roughly 550whp at ~28psi. I bought twin Setrab coolers but never swapped in them before I pulled everything for the V8 swap.
ARGHX : I don't really have a clean back-to-back comparison, since this was done alongside an engine rebuild and some other work over the course of 2 years (funny how a child and a house get in the way). However, I do have some old data logs with the air-to-air intercooler that I should be able to calculate the ambient temperature from, and compare it to new logs from the MS now. I am measuring the W2A intercooler water temp out of the IC and the temp half-way thru the heat exchanger, but those aren't logged so they will just be impressions. I hope to have the car registered again and back on the street by next week, and then after a break-in I can start looking at harder pulls.
SirCygnus : I could give you a full bill of materials, but a lot of things like the radiator support trimming, block-off panels, brackets etc were not things that I really documented thoroughly, measured, or drew up plans for. I tried to keep things simple, since I don't really have a welder or machine shop at my disposal, but the down-side is that everything is a bit more of a one-off.
Really nice job dude and great documentation.
but isnt that 350hp heat exchanger a bit small?
350hp worth of air flow in a rotary would be.. what 500ish in a piston?
Wow that is a super nice setup! The writeup is excellent as well! For what you're getting I think its an excellent way to go and it looks great in the engine bay!!! I'm a fan!
Really nice job dude and great documentation.
but isnt that 350hp heat exchanger a bit small?
350hp worth of air flow in a rotary would be.. what 500ish in a piston?
The difference in efficiency isn't that great, especially at WOT, but its possible its a bit undersized. Unfortunately, any of the larger cores would have been another inch thick and would not have had any chance of fitting under the hood. It is a 2.5" tube in and out, and because the W2A intercooler has larger air passages than water passages (so it will flow better for air than a comparatively sized air to air IC), it seemed like it would still work. Of course, the biggest part of the equation is the water flow and making sure that it was cooling off as close to ambient as possible, which is why I got the largest heat exchanger for the front of the car that I could find and package. This would help to ensure that I got every bit of excess heat out of the water, and that I had a nice big reservoir of cooler fluid to feed the pump and keep it from cavitating or drawing air. This should help to compensate for a slightly small IC size. Ultimately, taking data logs will tell the story.
06-27-18, 05:53 PM
