| I actually made this intercooler in December of 2011, but posted about EVLTWINZ first ( [ http://www.twinturbo.net/nissan/300zx/forums/general/view/2502762/Sneak-Peak-Part-3-continued-from-EVLTWINZ.html ] ) to follow up on his postings I met Serok at a local mini Z meet when heading to a local Pho house (Pho68), owned by a member of the ProjectZ crew (local 300zx club). Serok was looking to go hog wild & really liked the ideas I had. We talked for a while that night & continued talking & emailing there after. Many people ask me about build custom things for them, but never have money to actually pay for it. I was surprised when he told me of what was going on in his life & why he needed to do these upgrades in the time frame he had. We agreed on a very strict time frame & an incredible budget build, all done in my garage @ home. He agreed to remove all of the old parts & install all of the new parts with another local member that I know well. The difficulty started when I found out he never actually communicated that to the other local guy J. One agreement was for him to pay in full up front. When he brought the car over right before Christmas he did not bring the full about. I was very concerned, however I was already vented in the project since I had purchased the core, sheet metal, custom mandrel bent tubing, etc. The next bomb was that he wasn’t able to stick around to pull all of the old parts off the car & that the second person would not be coming that night either…… Long story short I continued on with the project by my self. I ended up working on Christmas Eve, took Christmas day off & continued the day after. Once I dug into the car I found out that it was a NA to TT conversion with the NA AC intact & that it also had been in a front in collision with remaining damage. Yay! Since the customer was on such a small budget I sourced a Chinese core for the base of the intercooler. I also decided to but the same size genuine Bell cores for a project on my personal Z that I hope to get to by the end of the year. Because of this I was able to compare a genuine core to a knock off core. I’m not very surprised by the differences.
Even though the internal louvering was similarly constructed, the quality was not the same. The Bell core had perfectly cut edges on its louvers where the china core had “slag” (for lack of a better term) hanging from many of the louvers. Imagine you are cutting a piece of sch40 2” pipe with a chop saw (abrasive metal blade) & once it’s cut there is part of the pipe that has been melted off & pushed to the outside of the pipe, instead of being cleanly cut (diamond tipped blade). That type of excess metal was hanging from the inside of the intercooler core. The cooling effect of bother cores I imagine will be similar, however the pressure drop will be higher on the Chinese core from the excess metal blocking the inside, which goes beyond disrupting the boundry layer of air for the sake of cooling & simply decreases the amount of air that can travel through the core. Additionally the stacks of bars & plate were not even close to level on the Chinese core, where the Bell core was perfectly flat. It made a big difference when it came to welding the end tank on. I had to remove the broken fiberglass front fascia while attached to the cracked fiberglass front ¼ panel. Part of the body was held together with zip ties. Other bolts were stripped & I was afraid of damaging the fragile poor fitting fiberglass body pieces any further than they were already.
 Guess what was behind that? Godspeed horizontal flow Greddy Knock Off IC
 Behind that is a high quality Z1 oil cooler & incredibly dirty poris foam “filters“.
 Pretty dirty engine bay, with wires that are not intended for the heat generated in automotive engine bays.
 Look at all of that piping!
 I test fitted the custom bends to see how well they would work with the NA AC system. There are no cut and weld joints here.
 Taking a look on where to cut some of the tubing shorter to make the best fitment.
 Tight fit on the intake piping with the NA AC lines still there.
 I drafted the end tank design in CAD (Vectorworks actually), printed it to paper, then confirmed it worked. I used that as my template to cut out the flat sheet aluminum. All the end tanks were formed using a variety of tools. Cut out flat sheet aluminum.
 The process started here.
 They started to take form here
 And here
 Test fitting after getting the shape close
 In the top view you can see where 2 cores were made into 1. Keep in mind this was an uber-budget build.
 Entry angle for the tubing to come in
 Its starting to look like an intercooler
 Loosely putting everything together before bolting it all up
 Everything is together & ready for a a test run.
 I had owner contact Greg & Seb @ Specialty Z for a new EPROM chip. The owner wanted me to dyno tune the car for him since he didn’t want to spend the extra money to go out to LA to visit SZ. I was already shorted cash on this job & after digging into the Z further I knew I didn’t want the liability of him turning up the boost, blowing his engine & blaming me….. The SZ chip idled excellently & ran very well. We took it for a street drive with the onboard AF gauge. After a few late night pulls away from any neighborhood residence we pulled the car over & continually checked all of the vitals. The car ran very well & the upper intake manifold was much cooler than my personal Z with SMIC during the dame night. All in all I’m glad I got the chance to at least break even, make another Z guy incredibly happy, create something from scratch & get a little more experience under my belt. I hope you all enjoyed the journey.
~Induetime~ "Lag Less"
500WHP/533WTQ Stock Turbo World Record Holder
New track car project "Diseaze": |
Another Custom Verticle Flow Front Mount Intercooler - 
