Fabricating a vertical flow intercooler

[brandon3212]

Howdy guys

I have been recently looking into FMIC kits for my car and with the industry I work in I thought "how hard could it be to build one?". It seems that in intercooler really isn't that hard to build since the only thing that really needs to be fabricated is the end tanks.

I really liked the look of the Full race kit because of it's pipe routing. I had planned to mount a large 19 row oil cooler as well as a Damond power steering cooler behind the passenger side foglight hole with ducting. I worry this will leave little room on this car for an intercooler pipe to run on the passenger side.



ducting like this would probably screw up allot of space on the passenger side.


Full race claims to use "baffled" end tanks on their intercooler, I'm assuming they just split the end tank down the middle like other manufacturers. This is why I came here, I know nothing about end tank design besides the basic shapes that would flow well.

Here is just a quick sketch I did, red being the baffles and the green rectangle being a kind of velocity stack to stop air from running into a the flat section of the end tank.

[Code Monkey]

What is the intended use of the car and power goals?

[brandon3212]

Originally Posted by Code Monkey What is the intended use of the car and power goals?

Main priority is track use (road course) and max power eventually would maybe by 300-350 on a CS turbo on 94 pump gas. Trying to plan for the future, I realize this probably wont be ideal for my K04.

[Code Monkey]

Keeping the A/C?

[brandon3212]

It's still here, although it doesn't even work so it will eventually be getting deleted.

[Code Monkey]

You can read through ups and downs of my design starting here, make sure to read until the very end (like 4 pages). A core is easy to source, piping is more tricky.

In an ideal world, I would run a custom radiator that is 3" shorter than stock (12" vs 15"), one small fan, coolant overflow relocated -- that should be enough to run intercooler piping over the radiator without hacking the stock radiator support.

[brandon3212]

I read the pages you pointed out, forgive my ignorance but I'm not sure how this pertains to my design? I don't plan on coming up with a new piping route, I'm going to copy the design Full Race uses with as many welded connections (as little silicone) as possible. I absolutely hate silicone...

Also I think I lost a few years off my life after seeing the insane amount of wiring removal you did. That gets me stressed out just looking at the pictures...

[Code Monkey]

If you track the car with that big FMIC blocking all the airflow to the radiator, you will be running 220-230 ECT's..... But yeah, if you want to fab your own IC, baffled endtanks have one internal baffle and that's it, I think. Treadstone has many to choose from.