Air to water inter cooled questions

tt335ci03cobra

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A good friend of mine really wants to find a way to avoid having to do a front mount intercooler because he’s finished up some great inner engine bay fender walls that he doesn’t want to hack up for cold plumbing space.

He’s got a twin hellion kit with turbos in the front lower bumper.

He’s trying to get a possible project going with a factory 03 cobra style in valley heat exchanger hooked up to a trunk mounted ice tank with feed and return loop plumbing, and maybe meth injection.

He has a heavily modified 01 cobra intake manifold. The heat exchanger would sit under it to charge the air before entering the heads.

He’d also run a nice front heat exchanger down low like a stock sc car.

He asked my opinion and while I think the idea is really cool, my gut hunch is that it won’t be enough cooling power.

His car makes about 700-800whp on pump gas at 12-15psi with twin 58’s and 1100+ on race gas with 25+psi. He drives it for a good stretch of 25-50 miles when Street driving and mostly summer.

What do you guys think? He’s a great dude and I don’t wanna shoot the idea down if I’m wrong but I also don’t wanna see a new motor blow. Am I being too precautious in saying I don’t think it’ll work well enough to keep it cool with moderate to spirited street driving mid summer?
 

DSG2003Mach1

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it shouldn’t toast a motor of temperature safe guards are used to pull timing

I’ve had this issue with my procharger being in FL and discussed it at length with my tuner. My air to air setup struggles to keep decent coolant temps when it’s really hot out and stuck in traffic because it can’t breath through the intercooler.

On the dyno at 15 psi IATS definitely start climbing.

Our discussion was that the sn95 platform has airflow issues but people don’t seem to talk about it much. His suggestion was a water to air system and that heat exchangers used with the newer Roush kits were extremely effective. It may also have some temp issues when run really hard on the street and be ice melts but at least you can ice down at the track

I’d be curious to see more temp data on this, I’m sure things are exponentially more efficient vs the old heat exchangers people were using
 

tt335ci03cobra

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^makes sense. I think with meth injection and air to water, plus the heat exchanger it can work, but I worry if any of it fails, how the remaining portions would do without each other.

That said, when a radiator or cooling fan fails it’s equally devastating so there’s no perfect setup
 

badcobra

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Put a factory '03 Cobra lower and intercooler back on it with a J2 fab lid and intercooler mod. He makes trunk tanks also. To me, seems like a lot of effort, time, and money vs a simple front mount. Drill a small hole for the charge pipe and be done with it IMO.

20181012_153441_HDR.jpg
 

DSG2003Mach1

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I remember reading about plenty of people not be thrilled with the power using the procharger hat over the stock intercooler, maybe the J2Fab option would be better.

I've been halfassedly looking into options, if I do try going that route I'll probably pick up a straight through intercooler from someone like frozen boost. The piping layout wouldnt be super efficient but I could at least test it that way. The biggest draw back for me is dealing with water res.

was posting from my phone last night - I had also talked to a local shop about this and they had played around with one of their guy's coyote cars on AA vs WA. I can't remember if he was still procharged or if it was a turbo car at this point... They used a 6.4 powerstroke intercooler with the lines just run out on the floor, no ice or anything and it picked up something like 50hp if I recall.
 

SecondhandSnake

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It can be done. I'm running just the water to air setup with my compounds. A guy I knew was running the stock heat exchanger on his Cobra he converted to a single turbo with a sheet metal upper on the 03 lower and his did well.

The limitation will probably be in the intercooler core itself. The J2Fab mod will certainly help if you don't want to opt for a larger core. I don't know what the efficiency of the straight through ones are. The trapezoidal ones can work amazingly well but take a lot of room to package.

Either way with a good size trunk reservoir, bigger pump, and bigger HE should give you good results.
 

biminiLX

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For full disclosure, my brother blew the Welds on his Procharger upper and essentially redid it similar to the J2 Fab lid above with single 90mm Fox TB.
I’d personally never do A-A after having both, currently A-W.
-J
 

01yellercobra

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I don't see how the intercooler would work with the 01 Cobra intake. His best bet would be the J2 set up mentioned above. Can he get creative if he went air to air? No one says the pipes have to go through the fender wells. There's other routing possible.
 

2fst4urtrk

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Im going a2w and using a garrett 750 core and some end tanks with a J2fab trunk tank. I was going to use the j2fab hat but decided to be stupid and make my own lol.
 

DSG2003Mach1

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i have my build on IG- #carboncobrasvt its a pain to load pics to photobucket then put URL in here lol. I may add a build thread later, just have a lot of pics and still doing some designing lol

I'll follow on there but also if you tapatalk or the svtp app you can just attach the pictures to your post directly. No photobucket bullshit
 

biminiLX

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awesome thanks for the info, ill download the app now!
What’s the power goal? Just asking with the 750 core you mentioned. Or are you building it in the intake?
Either way Garrett has quality cores, good choice.
Good luck
-J
 

2fst4urtrk

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What’s the power goal? Just asking with the 750 core you mentioned. Or are you building it in the intake?
Either way Garrett has quality cores, good choice.
Good luck
-J
Goal will be

16psi 91 oct tune uf i cant find e85 while driving. so around 600-650whp

22psi e85 tune so i can party, i have a j2fab trunk tank amd 1"lines. the 750 core should keep up but i may go to a 1000 core later if i need to change the design.





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JetmechF16

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I don't see how the intercooler would work with the 01 Cobra intake. His best bet would be the J2 set up mentioned above. Can he get creative if he went air to air? No one says the pipes have to go through the fender wells. There's other routing possible.
That was going to be my suggestion, if the turbos are already in the bumper he could have a really short cold side, just involves deleting the hood latch and going with pins. My i/c outlet exits the top and goes over the radiator support straight to the forward-facing t/b.

20190506_163709.jpeg


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