September 2005 - Custom intercooler and pipework

The more boost you run, the hotter the intake charge gets. That's fairly simple, so it made sense to follow the lead of other tuners and fit a better intercooler, one which flowed air better and had more surface area to cool the air.

The problem we had with this was that the intercoolers available to buy were not only eyewateringly expensive, but were designed to make comprimises for road cars with air-conditioning condensers, and standard turbo pipework.

We didn't have much cash, nor did we want to make comprimises! We are very fortunate in that Matt's brother is a skilled blacksmith, with tig welding equipment, so we intended to design something and get him to weld it up for us.

We realised that there was space in front of our existing intercooler to fit another standard 9000 intercooler, also, for future upgrading, Pace make a high efficiencuy intercooler core that is the same size as two 9000 intercooler cores sandwiched together. With this information we took two 9000 intecoolers, with the plasic ent tanks removed and asked Stuart (Matt's brother) to weld them together and fabricate end tanks.

We measured the throttle body at 3", and decided that where possible, this should be the minimum size of the intake. We had already removed the battery and tray from the engine (although we had not replaced it yet) and the washer bottle, so had plenty of space between the throttle body and intercooler. We bought some straight 3" aluminium pipe, and one 90 degree bend (mandrel bent)