Frederic's radiator cooled intercooler.

[Daniel Ciobota]

I missed the beginning of this thread, but Frederic's intercooler project caught
my eye.  I did a similar project last year along the same lines, but the results
were a bit disappointing.  here's what I did:

My engine at the time was a supercharged 5.0l mustang motor, putting out 390rwhp
with 7psi boost at the throttle.  I was running a buick boost retard at the
time, and I wanted to run max timing on pump gas.  The only way to do that was
to cool down the incoming charge (205deg) down to about 110-120.  There are
water/air intercoolers for those motors, but they cost $1000+.  I wanted
something cheap.

The system I put together was made of the following:
One transmission oil cooler (24x6x1"), cut in half lengthwise, making it a
24x3x1"
One transmission oil cooler, same as above but not cut.
One RV water supply pump (40gph, 9psi static pressure, I think).  It was
something like $70 at the rv supply place.
One windshield washer tank, modified to accept 3/8" hose.
3/8 hose.

The way I set it up was this.  I inserted the cut cooler into the intake plenum
(a cobra intake) by removing the 3" plug off one side of the plenum, and welding
a plug on one end of the cooler, with lines running through.  I aligned the
cooler so the air had to go through the cooler to get to the runners.  The pump
would pump water from the other cooler (the exhanger), through the plenum cooler
and back into the water tank.  On race day, the pump would be reversed  and the
water tank be filled with ice water for max cooling.

I took the setup to a flow bench and did before/after flows with the plenum
cooler.  Then, I ran a temp test with the cooler not running and the cooler
running ice water (35deg).  With an incoming air at 120deg, the outgoing air was
a mere 5 deg cooler!  The water temp hardly changed.  This was on an upper
intake flowing 273cfm on the flow bench.

Soo, my take on the trans cooler idea was that it was not nearly enough, at
least not for that setup.  Albeit Frederic's setup has a cooler at least 4 times
the volume probably, I think it's the exposed surface area that counts.  I've
looked at Vortech water/air intercooler, and it has a much larger surface area
that even the largest trans coolers.  Fred, are you going to do some numbers
testing on that beast?  I'd like to know what kind of temp drop you're getting
at what flow...  maybe I gave up too soon, but my results were pretty
discouraging.

Btw, I still have the water pump, the tank and the coolers if someone wants to
play with this some more...

Daniel