hand (although unused) at a good price, and had to make do with the two pipes
coming up the top.. alot of people go for coolers with the pipes poking out
either side midway, and go up around under the headlights.. I personally never
liked this idea anyway, and requires alot of stuffing around.. mind you, this
required a fair bit of stuffing around too.
Firstly I had to get the front bar off and try and work out what I had to do.. There was
4 nuts up the inside left and right of the front bar.. and then theres 2 main
support bar bolts on the left and right which you can see poking up from the
bumper below. Heres a close up shot.. those sound horns had to be relocated
later.
After having a bit of a fiddle around, trying to see how I could get this cooler to
fit, I found that the only way I could do it, was to modify a pair of the
support bars a little bit. The picture below points them out.. the middle one
that holds the bonnet clip had to be removed, and swapped with a similar type
bar to what youll find underneath your stock intercooler.. its a thin bar just
holding the body from flexing, I had a spare one so I was lucky there.
To get the intercooler to fit in without modifying the front bar, I had to modify
the support bars, and trimmed them up a bit..
Now to push the intercooler up into position, and see how it fits! It fitted quite
nicely, and I found some suitable brackets to hold it in place left and right..
as it turns out, only a very small section of the front bar itself needed to be
cut (very small, almost didn need to do it, unlike most people!).. and with the
front bar on, the intercooler was held in place very snugly..
Once that was all sorted out, I took it to an exhaust shop to get the piping done
up.. The stock airbox has a 3inch cold air intake mod, so just ignore that.. and
the charcoal canister was temporarily removed.
I did move the battery back a little bit, but it wasn really necessary.. (Some
people I know have had to get quarter(?) size batteries in order to allow the
placement of intercooler piping to come up under the headlight and past the
battery.. sheesh!)... I avoided most problems by using an intercooler with end
tanks in an unusual facing upward position.
Stupid me forgot to take more photos, but wat eventuated was, u put the new thermostat
into the engine. Attatch the self adhesive gasket to the thermostat housing.
Then you attach the housing so it looks like this.
Closer view of how it worked out going in and out of the turbo..
Overall, because of the black coated colour of the intercooler, the car didn display
obvious signs of a big front mount intercooler.. Which is the look I liked..
less hassles from the police and most people don expect a car to be quick when
they can spot a big front mount
The next stage was a T28BB Turbo, larger AFM, larger injectors and retuned ECU.. it
all did happen, and this FMIC took me to 170kw@wheels from a CA18DET engine! :-)
lol
