Smart car Intercooler for TDI?

 

good question timmythedog,

 

Been lookin at both options for ages reading and reading everything that I could find and there lots open for debate, but what i have read time and time again is water is 4 times more absorbant than air when soaking up heat. We also have very different set up's then most folk in the car world as our engines are rear, so running large FMIC are out of the question for us! so we can considder installing one in the rear whilst trying to keep the pipe within 0.75 of a metre and trying to get fresh cool air into the intercooler, not impossible, but also not easy! charge cooling also lends itself here are we have the chargecooler rad up front and the chargecooler header tank in the rear, there's about 9 feet of hose in the system and lots of water, which helps with keeping the water cooler, if done correctly you shouldn't see the same part of water move through the chargecooler in the same boost cycle. cooler air bigger bang!

 

thats the idea anyway!

 

At the moment i'm going the same route and westyguesty and t3di, i'm currently fitting the subaru leg'y chargecooler, which incidently is black! and that's another no go as far as a bad heat spong colours. so that's going into the sand blaster to get back to ally before its fitted.

 

I also run a wrz scoobie which has a front mounted intercooler, on a hot day its still pants! you can really notice the power loss. on a cold day totally different beast.

 

Got the charge cooler rad fited up front below the oil cooler at the weekend and currently fitting the pump and routng the hoses to the rear. will post pics at some point.

 

if you go intercooler route, its needs to be ducted to be any good!

the smartcar intercooler is a good size!

 

good luck

Hills

 

 

 

As we know there is not a lot of room for a big one so i thought i would fit 2 small ones.

If it works it works if not it was fun!!

Firstly I should say i'm a bit of a bodger who does it all in a hurry cos I can't wait to see the results, so a lot of thoughtful tidying up could be done here!

 

 

I have kicked out the air vent by a couple of inches to (hopefully) increase airflow.

 

Induction cone filter mounted a on a simple bracket behind the battery and connected to original turbo inlet pipes via  a length of silicone hose, as per photo below.

 

Both boot corners are sealed off(90%) with some old thermal window panels which are glued into place. It would be better to velcro these for easy removal. Hence, i cannot show a top shot of the intercooler cos i don't want to peel the panel open!

 

Pipe work was all scavanged bits of Jx and tdi golf which are bodged together with sealants, internal collars(from the golf) and jubilee clips. Lower hose comes away from turbo with JX turbo pipe then feeds between the engine cradle and chassis and up through a hole in wheel arch to intercooler. This needs tidying up and sealing off properly but is largely protected by mudguard. Intercooler to inlet manifold is 2 hoes bonded, with a small section of silicone too. I have a got a modified JX inlet that has the inlet moved to the top plate and this would be better but it's fine as is.

 

Last one. View from underneath of outlet face of intercooler shrouded in some aluminium box section that I came by! Intercooler is a 1Z. I have bonded a 7inch(i think) electric fan on top of it which runs permanently.

Does it work well? I don't know. I could easily bypass it to compare old and new, but it certainly feels a lot quicker. I have nudged the fuelling up about an eigth turn.  The van will accellerate willingly up hills in fourth gear. It pulls strongly, and revs out to 4000 with no fuss, but pulls like a train between 2000 and 3200rpm. the whole set up cost me about £150 so i can't complain. It does require the butchering off a bit of panel work though and as mine happened to be pretty crispy anyway it wasn't too painful.