Hopefully I'll get the data to show how its performing soon - unfortunately on the car's maiden voyage around the neighborhood after rebuilding the engine and putting all this together, the oil cooler cracked at the thermostat bung and emptied most of its oil. It never lost oil pressure (thankfully it was a very short drive and I caught it quickly), but I am still looking for a replacement oil cooler and need to install it. Then, its break-in time for the engine, and then I can start boosting and getting performance numbers.

 

I was thinking about how prone the intercooler would be to heat soak and getting warm from the engine & air coming off the radiator, and since the system was already drained to get access to the oil cooler, I decided to try to do something about it. Since I had plenty of the corrugated plastic signs, and they already have all these little air pockets inside of them, I figured they would work very well as insulation as long as the open edges of the corrugation was sealed off. So, I did some tracing, made a pattern, and figured out how to run a bunch of zip-ties to hold it all on to the intercooler in a removable way.

More St. Nick's Speed Parts!

Then, once I had the pattern down, I took some reflective aluminum foil tape and covered the outside of the sheet with it, and wrapped it around the edges to seal off and trap the air pockets inside the corrugation channels for insulation. I went with reflective tape mostly for the look - it would theoretically help with reflecting radiant heat, but thats only a concern if the piece has a direct line-of-sight to something really hot, like over 500 C, since radiation levels are proportional to temperature^4. Things at 90 - 100C, like the coolant, radiator, and outside of the engine (except the exhaust & turbine housing) have no appreciable radiant heat transfer, its all convection through the air or to the coolant.

I did cut holes in the sheet for the mounting pads to stick through, and one on the underside over the alternator since the clearance there was already very tight (I bent the end tank inwards to give more room for swinging the alternator up to tension the belts). I'm not too concerned about this part, since this is the hot side of the intercooler anyway - when the turbo is really working & making boost, the gas coming out of it could be 150C or more, at which point insulation would only be keeping heat in, not out.




Its not the prettiest, but its a lot better than the sign alone would be. The tape was a lot more stiff than I anticipated too, so getting each strip nice and straight was very important. Now, here it is, installed in the car. The second picture also shows the cut-away needed in one of the hood supports so that the hood closes properly without hitting.

 

I wish I knew of these setups when I had turbo cars. Just never considered them.

But very clean, very nice setups.

Thanks!