This article is ntended to show you how and where to mount your ebay interccoler.
The intercooler chosen for this article is 12X24X3 core, 31" endtank to endtank.
1. Remove your plastic lenses, grill insert and both corner lights. If you have foglights, this would be a good time to remove them as well. To remove your lenses, pop your lights up, and remove screws that are holding both lenses and front grille insert. Once screws are removed, press a little tab inside plasic clips holding lenses and grille to remove them. Once front lenses and grille is removed, both corner lights can be removed by removing two screws that hold each one of them and sliding them out towards the front of the car. lightbulbs will need to be removed as well.
Get your car looking like this:
2. Next, remove plastic shielding from both of the wheel well fronts. Shilding is held in place by plastic rivets. To remove them, unscrew cecnter portion of the rivet (no pressure should be applied while doing that to avoid pushing center crews back in) and then take the rest of the rivet out. After this step, your car should look like this:
3. Once all the shielding is removed, start removing air ducting. Since it will not be reused, rivets can be simply cut off with a chizel and a hammer. Your trash can should look like this when you're done:
4. When ducting is removed, start on the bumper cover. There are several 10mm bolts holding it down to the metal bumper on top, two 10mm bolts on the sides, under the corver lights, and two more in the same location, but bolted from underneath the bumper, on the inside. If you still have lower bumper support, undeo that as well. Once all the bolts are undone, go a head and remove the bumper cover. Now you will see metal bumper. To remove it, simply undo four 14mm nuts (shown by white arrows in the next picture) and pull the bumper off. This is how your car should look after this step:
5. Remove hood latch support (it's former ocation is shown by the white dotted line) Former bolt location is shown by white arrows.
6. Now it's time for the AC removal. Pleas note, that this intercooler will not fit with AC due to condencer bottle location. Here, I assume that your AC has already been properly drained. Remove condencer bottle (on the pass. side of the radiator support, in fron of the AC condencer). Menthods of remove the bottle and condencer itself I leave up to you. You can either cut the lines, or unbolt them, if you wish to save them. After you're done, youcar should look like this (radiator removed of course). Powersteering cooler is unbolt here.
7. Now you come to a choice. You can do three things about your powersteering cooler bar, but you can't leave it where it is. Option A would be to remove it all together and somply loop the line from the rack back into the bottle. This will not hurt car's dail-driving ability, but autocross would not be recommended. Option B is to replace your P/S cooler with a universal core and mount it on the radiator surface. Option C is to bend the lines out of the way, closer to the radiator, but make sure you don't collapse them. Next picture shows P/S cooler eliminated completely:
8. Now it's time to bolt up the intercooler. For that, we'll use mounts for the plastic lenses. They aready have holes, but you will need to ellongate the holes towards the sides of the car. I used porting bit, but there are other ways as well. Once you get those holes to match up with intercooler mounting points, get a pair of 12mm standard dsm botls, about 3/4" long, a pair of big washers and bolt the untercooler up.
9. If you notice, in the next picture, we put some napkins between the intercooler and the radiator support, on the bottom. This is important. Intercooler may not touch any part of the radiator support, or it will rattle and aluminum in the intercooler will actually grind away slowly. Napkins are used here to palce intercooler in the desired position, before lower brackets are fabricated to secure it for good. It doesn't need to be more then 1/4" away from the lower radiator support.
10. It's time to fabricate lower brakets. You can use regular steel bar. Whatever you're confortable to bend. The idea is simple. You need to introduce approx. 3/4" step in the brakeds to join FMIC and lower radiator support. There are alread well-located 12mm bolt holes in the lower rad. support. All you need to do is make a braket to go from those holes to the FMIC mounting points. Look at the picture to give you an idea of what those brakets should look like.
