Received my Pte core about a month ago from slowboyracing and just got the intercooler pipes finished(welded and painted). I spent $500 on the fmic and $100+ at roadraceengineering for steel pipes couplers and 4 t-bolt clamps. I had the pipes tig welded by a marine in my unit who is a welder . The install was strait foward, and pretty much idiot proof with all the fmic diy articles on here and other sources. I used 2 u-bends 2 90 degree bends and some strait pipe. I also used my roadraceengineering 16g install kit to face the intercooler pipeing toward the driver side instead of the passenger side where the stock smic used to be. Then after that I ran the pipe under the front brace that runs from the bumper area to the transmission area. From there it hits a strait pipe to a u-bend that was cut in half with an additional 3" more of pipe to make it more along the lines of two 90 degree bends to go around the front right side. Then I ran into a situation with the powersteering cooling line and had to remove it and loop it with some coolant hose I had left over. with that I had the intercooler mounted with two brackets a machinest made me and then tig welded to the fmic and removed the bumper support cause mine was fiberglass instead of metal so I didnt feel like haking up a fiberglass support and itching for the rest of my life Mounted the fmic and ran two 90 degree pipes connected by a hump hose up to the uicp using the old braided uicp as a coupler and for the time being have the uicp connected to the factory tb flange cause its alluminum and that cant be welded to steel so I'm waiting to order the tb flange from rre. That is all and I hope somebodylearned something from this install since I couldnt find one install on a 2g with this core. Thanks for the space

More pics of the install. The rest of the install with the pipes painted and all will be posted in the morning.

Looks sweet, those welds are clean! Nice look all in all, I can't wait to get some pics of it on the car and painted again!

Thanks man, you should see some of the work this guy can do with a tig. WTF . Thats the look I had on my face. I'll show you a weld from my downpipe he did as well.

Definitely looks good! I guess it should though, since he's a professional haha..looks like I might be sending my dp and flange to u guys haha, the last guy that did it, did it..good, but definitely room for improvement..Can't argue w/ free work though I guess LoL...

BTW your lady friend has nice feet haha just kidding

Josh

looks nice...

Nice welds, plus your long route looks much better then greddy's kit. Now you just need one of those big turbos you want to fully utilize that huge core. Keep us posted with your buildup.

Well I would look into putting a bigger turbo on there for that is one of my next upgrades in my little upgrade path but.......as for a bigger turbo I cant do that (which will be either the hx-35 or hx-35/40 hybird) untill this 2.4 thats just sitting in my wifes trunk makes its way up to rre for new slugs and rods and the works. Here are some pictures of the g46b sitting in my wifes trunk


**EDIT** And yea this is out of the fwd so the bellhousing will fit my 2g, unlike the rwd g46b.

Here are the rest of the install pics, lots of little things to note. Such as I have to now adjust the licp before the intercooler under the downpipe cause when I hit bumps it scrapes. And I scraped paint off of a few of the pipes with a difficult install and fitting. Here are the rest of em.

Some of the last ones

Yeah, you can't have your ic pipe lower than your cross member otherwise you'll scrape everywhere. Looks good though.

looks good, just wondering why you painted the pipes red? on a white car

Thats the core Im running. Its sweetass and I have never ever heatsoaked it no matter how hard I tried the hottest days at 25psi on my 50 trim no probs!!!! Mine was mounted though using the stock side mounts in the cooler its self. Had it off last night hooking up the N-Tercooler sprayer!

BTW what is with that ghetto IC pipe below the freakin crossmember? Your not leaving that there are you? First speed bump or anything kiss that goodbye!

And where did you get that sweet flange for the TB for your IC pipes thats sweet instead of the ghetto bolt on S pipe like mine.

hellotbone said:

Thats the core Im running. Its sweetass and I have never ever heatsoaked it no matter how hard I tried the hottest days at 25psi on my 50 trim no probs!!!! Mine was mounted though using the stock side mounts in the cooler its self. Had it off last night hooking up the N-Tercooler sprayer!

BTW what is with that ghetto IC pipe below the freakin crossmember? Your not leaving that there are you? First speed bump or anything kiss that goodbye!

And where did you get that sweet flange for the TB for your IC pipes thats sweet instead of the ghetto bolt on S pipe like mine.

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Well the pipe below the crossmemeber will be getting a 2 1/4-2 1/2 coupler as soon as it arrives and as far as the pipe scrapping, when i cut off about two inches off the end of that licp it will raise it up alot and put it basically touching the crossmember and not scrapping, and besides I drove it around today everywhere here in socal and anyone who lives in socal knows we got those god forsaken drain/flood routing bullsh!t on the sides of the road so any turns and your dipping and I didnt srape it at all(although earliar today it was but after some readjusting its good I just havent taken a pic of that re-adjustment yet). And as for selecting color, black absorbs too much heat and I already have steel pipes so no way on that and the only reason I painted them was cause I left them the steel color before I went to the field for 2 weeks(got to love the usmc ) I came back and there was a storm and all my pipes were rusted from licp all the way to the s-pipe. And as for the tb flange its just a stock piece cut off with a 2 1/4-2 1/2 coupler attatched to it and the 2.5 uicp. And like Jaime said wow, I dont have a data logger yet or in my case dsmlink (thats why my 550's and 255 pump are sitting on the kitchen table as we speak) but when I touch the pipe after the ic wow really fcking cold and without a logger of some sort I cant tell you of any hp gains but from just driving it it feels like I had a slight gain, even with a gigamongus ic and a wittle turbo(which I thought would kill my spool and anything else it could). Overall the best 500 I have spent so far. Next I'm getting some twin tips from rre tom to make my exhaust look nice and stealth

Same core I have as well. I would have personally just polished the piping, but it looks good nonetheless. On mine I did the short route piping which is VERY easy to do with this core on a 2g. I would redo that lower pipe though, definitly hangs too low. Also, I notice from one of the front view pics the intercooler is not centered ... any reason for that??

You can use a n/t throttle body and then you can do the upper pipe the same way he did it since they are set up for a coupler.

Is this the AS1025 (600 HP rated) or the AS1026 (750 HP rated) core? Thanks.

Its the gigamongus 750 hp core from pte.

I just now saw in your profile that you are running a 16g ... what's the purpose of an intercooler of that size? I went 12.60 back in my 16g days on a sidemount. An intercooler of that volume is not going to work as well as a smaller well flowing core would. Do you plan to upgrade turbos soon? I too like the look of a fmic like that but on a 16g it seems to be a waste of money.

Yea man as soon as my 2.4 is done I'll be attaining a gt-35r or a 30.

gSx_r1der said:

Yea man as soon as my 2.4 is done I'll be attaining a gt-35r or a 30.

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Thats what I like to hear.

Well I cant upgrade everything at once so i decided to go with the fmic now and fuel next along with taking block to rre and getting that ready to bolt the gt35 on there but another reason for keeping the 16g untill then is to maximize the 16g and learn to properly tune with a wittle turbo and break in the 2.4 as well with the 16g instead of 15 psi on a gt35. So there are my reasons for going big fmic and pluss if I ever want to get up there in the numbers ill never have to upgrade fmic again.

1fast97gsx said:

I too like the look of a fmic like that but on a 16g it seems to be a waste of money.

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I repectfully disagree with this... here's why.

Bigger usually equals better with intercoolers, even on the T-25. The added cooling capacity coupled with the less restrictive core more than makes up for the volume difference.

The other factor to consider is the amount of air turbochargers really move. The difference in volume betwen a stock SMIC and a huge FMIC is not much when you look at how much air is gulped by the engine itself. An engine rotating even at 3,000+RPM is going to consume so much air that a little extra volume before the engine won't hurt spool time noticably, if at all.

I've talked to people who have moved from a modest sized front mount air/air intercooler to a passenger seat or even back seat mounted HUGE air/water core with a TON more piping in mustangs and camaros and reported no difference at all in spool. That's a much bigger difference in charge pipe volume than going to a fairly large air/air core like this, so I don't think you'll notice anything.

psychlow said:

I repectfully disagree with this... here's why.

Bigger usually equals better with intercoolers, even on the T-25. The added cooling capacity coupled with the less restrictive core more than makes up for the volume difference.

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Although you are correct in an extent, bigger is not always better in an intercooler. Pressure drop as well as how well it flows are moreso what will make the difference in the end, rather than the size of the core. The problem is that most "bigger" intercoolers have a higher pressure drop than a small ( good ) intercooler would have. This is where the spool up comes into play. I do agree that on a t25 there won't be a noticeable difference in spoolup with a larger intercooler, but the reason is that turbo has no lag to begin with. If you have a scm61 for example and run a small / efficient intercooler and the throw a large intercooler on there I guarantee you will notice spool differences as well as SLIGHT power differences. I suppose it's like an injector, you can run a 1600 cc injector on a 16g car just fine if it's properly tuned / supported, but why do it? Now in his case he said he will be upgrading to a gt35r so the core he chose is perfect. I guess everyone has different thoughts and ways of looking at things, and without real life data taken at the track with the exact same conditions we won't know what the difference really is.