Friday night I went back to the hometown to help my sister pick out a pet hedgehog. The store didn't have any yet. So my friend Tim and I decided to put my intercooler on that night instead of the next day. What follows is the story of what happened during the next five hours.

We went to Tim's dad's shop two towns and fifteen miles away. It's a company that specializes in building, modifying, and repairing plastic thermoforming machines. (My hometown of Beaverton, MI is the Plastics Thermoforming Capitol of the World, btw)
My intercooler is a 9"x27"x2.5" core, with six mounting nuts, size M12x1.75x25. This is a very difficult bolt size to find, but I found some at Home Depot that were about the right size, which is to say LARGE. We started by taking off the bumper and bumper reinforcement, a bracket that previously held my foglights and the horn on. Now my car looks like this:


That's Tim, trying to loosen up rusty bolts and relocate my horn to a frame hole. It's going to have to move again later due to pipe clearances, but oh well.

Next, I rerouted the power steering fluid cooler lines so that it bypasses the cooler completely, and I removed the power steering fluid cooling loop. If in the future I need a cooler, I can get one for $15 at an autoparts store. Now we started looking around the shop for something to make brackets out of. Tim was thinking about using angle iron (even though it's really steel; we had a lengthy conversation about that point) to make a bracket but I wasn't seeing his vision. I eventually found a long enough L-shaped peice of steel with a hole in one end that I thought would be sturdy enough and shaped well enough for our purposes. Tim looked at it and said, "That's angle iron." Oh. We drilled a hole in the center support, tapped it, then drilled a corresponding hole in the bracket. On the car:


And with the intercooler mounted to this one bracket:


At this point you can see the size difference between the stock Sidemount and the Front Mount. The fluid unerneath the right wheel is p-steering fluid that leaked out and the dangly thing on the left is my horn.

Now we noticed that the bottom of the intercooler was pretty much even with the bottom of the frame, so we spent a while debating how to do the bottom brackets. One thought was to just make straight steel strips from the bottom of the frame to the two bottom mounting nuts, with maybe a spacer to accomodate height differences. Tim found some scrap steel strips and started drilling holes in them. However, he didn't get very far. Each drill bit he tried didn't put more than a little dent in the steel. And then he started laughing as he realized where this particular piece of scrap came from: it came from an oven used in a thermoforming machine, which meant it had spent it's life getting hot and cooling down repeatedly for months or years. In other words, it was tempered steel. What we decided instead was to use a similar piece like the upper bracket and use a spacer to push it out far enough to be even with the upper bracket. It ended up looking like this:


We drilled and tapped the frame, cut a 3/4 square bar for a spacer, and inserted a bolt.

Next came the smelly, messy part. The fiberglass and resin reinforcement bar had to be cut to fit around the top of the intercooler. I marked out a line and used a Sawzall to cut. Fiberglass and resin turn to mush when it gets hot, just to let you know. Got it cut and fit it back on the car.


We do the same thing to the bumper cover, including cutting off the grille. I get to use an air-powered cutoff wheel. This REALLY stinks, is throwing up lots of grey smoke and flinging long strands of molten fiberglass, and is basically not pleasant. But we got it done, mounted the bumper back on, and this is how she looks.


The zip-tie on the right is due to my forgetting one bolt at home, so we used it to secure the intercooler to the bumper and get it home. Note: my headlights aren't on, it's just reflection from the flash.

Next day, a trip to Lowe's buys a bolt, three washers, and a lock washer. Install on the third bracket and that's all she wrote. The intercooler is on rock-solid, awaiting pipes and couplers. Total install time: 4.5 hours or so, with NO snags (a first for me) and only TWO instances of bleeding (caught my thumb between the rear end of pliers, scraped fingers on steel grate in shop). The final product, after a car wash and in daylight:


So, pipes aren't on it yet. I have a slim-line fan on order to replace the radiator fan, am going to do the rewire mod to link both fans together just to be sure it'll get enough flow, then I have to buy couplers and have some pipes made up, then paint them. Should be totally done in a few weeks.