Well im sitting here trying to put into words what has happened in the last few days and how grateful i am that you get chance to meet certain people in this world.
The person or may i say the group are Enhanced Performance, never have I met a bunch of guys willing to go massively out of their way to help someone with a project, its the type of thing that really makes a company in my eyes!
Earlier on in this thread I mentioned that they were going to help me fit an intercooler, so we booked it in for wednesday to come down and get it done.
Leaving at 400am in the morning i head down south so that i can be there for when they open, on the way down i did a bit of mapping on the cruise parts of the map.
Holding 15.8-16.2afr at 70mph meant im now getting 29mpg which is a lot better than most get, it being my daily driver its important to get some sort of economy!
So i arrive at 8am, watch 30mins of a movie on my laptop and then Luke arrives.
Straight away im offered a drink and we start chatting ideas, i have a look around the workshop and im amazed at the variety of cars there.....from the famous escort of dannys to an impreza, celica gt4 and even an old lotus elan.
We start stripping all the old tiny intercooler off and removing the rad outside(to stop water filling the garage)
Very small cooler, would be great for a kitcar with a turbod engine id imagine
Nice big space to work with
Once that was off we stood the radiator upright...it normally sits almost horizontal, then extended the brackets to encorporate this, once that was done a short couple of cuts to the rad hosing to twist them around into position and bobs your uncle.
In the afternoon a fella turned up with a stupidly mint old school yb powered escort, now to say this thing was mint is a bit of an understatement, it had come from malta so you know what they are like over there.
The reason for its visit was he had blown his turbo pretty much on the first day......fairly unlucky id say, so Luke found him another one and we got on with fitting it.
Now ive fitted turbos to all sorts of things over the years but never have i had so much problem doing this one.
the turbine housing had been left on and the owner had put the turbo back into the housing and was trying to bolt it back together.
First thing i did was adjust the centre section so the oil would flow perfectly vertical, tightened the bolts then adjusted the comp housing so that silicone pipe wasnt restricted.
feeling pretty happy with myself at that point was my big mistake of the day!!
Once i come to put the oil return pipe on we found it hit the manifold.......so i had to then loosen the bolts and clock the centre around, we then had to then reclock the comp housing back to the right position.....felt like it took forever as theres a lot of bolts to play with!
Anyway once it was all done, luke stuck it on the rollers.
Now there has been a bit of debate on these forums about power out of such and such etc but im not one to blindly follow a tuner war and watched this session with an open mind.
Now i have seen a lot of dyno graphs, including afr.....or lamda as luke kept reminding me haha.
Ill be the first one to call someones mapping crap, i pick no bones about it, if your crap ill tell everyone to avoid you and have in the past mentioned maybe 7 or 8 companies on forums who ive actually watched map a car and wouldnt touch with a bargepole, if id have seen crap mapping that day it would be the last time id ever visit them.
After watching luke map i can honestly say i was very very impressed, for a start the dynodynamics rollers are a work of art, so much better than anything else ive come across, you can really see why they are rated the best in the world, lukes afr figures were spot on and flat like a billard table, no up and down like a yoyo as ive seen on other peoples, id highly recommend him for mapping pretty much anything, the amount of equipment he has and the knowledge he has doesnt seem at all to be limited to the usual ford engines, give him pretty much any car with a crank in it and he will successfully map it, for example they have mapped a 1000bhp supra drag car and at that level if your crap things go wrong very quickly!
Well that was pretty much day 1 of my southern road trip, luke very kindly lent me his skyline so i could drive to the local premier inn(hardest bad in the world!) for the night........i dont think i know of anyone who would lend a young lad they hardly knew a rwd skyline to drive around in, was actually pretty nice to drive......but yes its a skybus, the M25 is a small circle than the steering wheel on it, it was HUGE!
The next day i arrive at 830am ready to get the car finished.
The biggest issue was the intercooler to be honest, i actually feel really guilty about it because i didnt really tell the guys how much of a massive job this was going to be, but in there professionalism they cracked on with it anyway.
the intercooler is an ebay GTR replica, they have already been run on 1000bhp skylines so i know they will take the power......plus i only paid £78inc shipping for it brand new, the real greddy version are around £1500.....so a big saving!
After discussing multiple ways we could fit it we narrowed it down to 2 choices, either fit it in the engine bay or fit it in the bumper, eventually we decided to fit it in the engine bay, which is where a lot of time has been spent.
The reason for this is 4 fold.
1. It shortens the pipework with saves weight and can help with throttle response.
2. Because the cooler weighs around 14kg, you want it as far back as possible to maintain the cars perfect 50/50 weight distribution, the car has already lost 90kg over factory figures and most of that is from the rear so having even more weight further forward wont help matters, ive removed the front bumper bar to help out but the closer to the centre of the chassis the better!
3. If you were to be involved in a minor accident, say someone reversed into it while its parked, because its so large there would literally be about 5mm of plastic between it and the offending car, which could easily ruin your brand new cooler.
4. Because im using the original bumper you are very restricted in terms of the airflow allowed to the engine and running a cooler this thick can cause issues, now if we fitted it in the bumper what would happen is air would only be able to pass through about 30% of the cooler as the rest would be blocked by the bumper.....also any that did hit the intercooler would be spilled over the sides and over the bonnet and to the oil coolers, as the air will just get backed up infront of the cooler like so:
As you can see from my dodgy drawing once the air has entered the bumper there is physically nowhere for it to go but through the intercooler hence im making maximum use of the limited opening
the big problem with fitting it into the engine bay is that its so wide that it physically wont fit.
Here below is a picture to give you an idea
the bottom arrow dictates that the chassis rails are 710mm wide and that the cooler is much bigger.
so the end tanks were cut off and new ones made from scratch, the only issue with doing this is that air likes to take the path of least resistance and if we basically just 'backdoored' the cooler you would find the bottom of the cooler wouldnt actually cool the air properly.
quick Paint pic to help with new idea
So what we decided was to fit the inlets pointing down into the cooler, that way the flow of air will be directed to the lower parts of the cooler and be more effecient, the idea came from rods cooler that he had done.
Infact the physical size of the core is very similar to rods, just a bit thicker(4.7in vs 3.8in) so it should be pretty comparable.
once the cooler was in and the rad bolted up the fun part was welding on the inlets, that probably took the most time to make sure we got everything angled correct, to say it was a tight fit was an understatement!
The next part was fun, because the car only comes with 2.75in pipework from factory and ive still got the stock twin turbos on there we had to work out how to 'upscale' as such from turbos to cooler.
Luckily i had brought with me a piece of the old intercooler kit that i never bothered with, it was just what we needed, unfortunately it was made from the worst aluminum known to man, so there was a lot of grumbles to be heard while the tig welder was in force!
But happily he came up with this.
Because the original end was such a wide angle, we cut a slice in it to tighten the angle so it wouldnt pop out of the turbo outlet
We then connected up the pipework from the intercooler to the throttle body, if you look back a few pages you will see that i attacked the aftermarket elbow to increase its size from 70mm to 80mm inlet size just for this day so that the there would be no restrictions in flow
then we moved back tot he turbo side and used a long 3inch silicone pipe to connect them up.
The reason for this is because silicone pipe is a worse conductor of heat than metal, this means that when the car is at low rpm or has been left standing still you wont have heatsoak problems, as the heat from the turbos heats up the turbo outlet pipe you can physically feel the silicone pipe getting colder as it heads towards the intercooler, last night i couldnt even touch the turbo pipe yet 20cm down it was cold to the touch, well before the intercooler entry
At this point we were coming up to 7pm and since we had been on it since 9am in the morning it was decided to try and finish it, the wiring loom had been removed out of the way while we were designing it and to save time we cable tied it between the engine and the rad, which means ill be taking everything out next week when i get chance and routing it all in properly, the reason we couldnt do it at that time was we needed to extend a lot of wires and it was late in the day, but overall i think it looks amazing!!!
in this picture below you can really see how thick this thing is, everyone laughed at the madness of a 120mm core
And in this one you can really see what i was on about when i mentioned about where to put the intercooler, look how small the opening is in the bumper, would have struggled to get any decent air contact over the cooler!
So if you have read all this so far, well done i appreciate your interest!
But its all well and good fitting something like this but the most important question is does it actually work.
I can categorically say it works better than i could have imagined!
I did some testing the previous weekend running 17psi of boost on v-power fuel. I recorded 49c inlet temps and knock of around 35-40 on the power fc commander.
With the new setup running the same boost, when it come on boost the knock went down to 8, but only on 95ron aswell which is madness!!
Cruising along the motorway gave me 21c inlet temps(used to be 37c) but the best thing about it is that when i pull up to 17psi of boost the actually inlet temps drop to around 19c, which means the sensor is reading 21c cruise because of the inlet manifold keeping it warm!
Id imagine with my 20psi of planned boost for the twins while i save up for the rest of the bits im looking at 25c max inlet temps in boost!
One other concern that people have shouted at me is water temps, that running such a thick cooler will mean no air to the rad and that it will overheat, again this was proven false because most rx7s run the cooler in the bumper which ive previously mentioned causes very small amount of air to enter the engine bay, by far this setup of mine fixes those issues.
cruising to Enhanced gave me 86c water temps.....thats with the rad getting the full use of the incoming air to its entire surface, on the way home with the big intercooler i was sitting at 86-87c so it made no difference and infact i wasnt running the undertray(put it in the boot for me to refit when i get chance) so putting that back on will probably help improve it even further!!
So what have i learnt from my 2 days experience.........well its hard to put it into words really, ive never ever been impressed with any company like i have with Enhanced Performance, the quality workmanship, the hard work ethic and most importantly there customer service skills, Luke really has been a revelation in terms of someone to deal with, for example driving half way around the south of london getting pipework for me at 9am in the morning to make sure the car looked the best it possibly could be, ive met a lot of tuners and most talk to you like your retarded, but here they listened to me, expanded on my ideas and treated me with respect and that is what every tuner should do by default.
Would i recommend them after this, 110% I would, from the wealth of experience they have I dont think theres nothing they could do, from Luke and Ike mapping skills.....i think Ikes amazing, the things hes done and still doing blow my brain...hes worth the visit across the country just to speak to him.
Pretty much any type fabricating you can think of, whether its exhausts, manifolds, intercoolers, radiators, custom camshafts ,rods, pistons...they can pretty much create anything for any car.
And to finish it off you wont meet a nicer pair of guys between Luke and Danny whatever you go to them for, Ford or not
