Respiration Aspirations - Intercooler Pipe R&D: Complete Design

Respiration Aspirations - Intercooler Pipe R&D: Complete Design

Breathing: something that is unanimously regarded as important. Trees breathe, you breathe (I hope), even cars and trucks breathe.

If you're an auto-enthusiast, you don't think too much about those first two facts, but you're always thinking about that last one. After all, an engine in its simplest form is an air pump. That means the amount of power an engine makes is largely determined by how much air it can pull in and push out. There's a reason that intakes and exhaust are often the first modifications on cars and trucks.

Intakes and exhausts aren't the only way to increase the power and efficiency of an engine. If your vehicle has forced induction, you know there are a lot of components between the outside air and the engine's cylinders that can have major effects on power. If there are two turbos in that equation, like the 3.5L EcoBoost found in the 2017+ F-150, those components are even more critical to your engine's respiration.

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Getting the pipes that carry all that compressed atmosphere to your engine right is one of the most important aspects of tuning a turbocharged engine. Without intercooler piping, all that power your turbochargers make would be released into the atmosphere as nothing more than hot air. You can also lose a lot of that power potential if your intercooler pipes are incorrectly sized. Intercooler pipes that are too small or have hard bends can restrict flow, making your turbochargers work harder and become less effective. Too large and the turbos won't be able to flow enough air to fill them and you'll lose boost pressure.

Plastic has overtaken the engine bays of most modern vehicles.
Plastic has overtaken the engine bays of most modern vehicles.

Strength is also an important factor in intercooler pipes. When your turbos are exerting 18+ pounds of pressure against every square inch of material, a single crack or chip could prove disastrous. This is especially true for pipes equipped on vehicles like the 2017+ F-150, and even more so on the F-150's Raptor variant. Every wide-open throttle pull at the drag strip. Every pothole on the highway. Every dune jump in the desert. They all put stress on your truck's components, including the intercooler pipes. Adding more boost to the mix just adds that much more stress to the intercooler pipes.

It's for these reasons that many F-150 EcoBoost owners choose to upgrade their plastic intercooler pipes to higher-flowing, more durable aluminum pipes.

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At Mishimoto, we've drawn on our knowledge of the EcoBoost platform to develop just that for the 2017+ F-150/Raptor 3.5L EcoBoost. Like all our products, we've spent countless hours making sure our intercooler pipes fit like stock, while allowing your 3.5L's twin-turbo induction system to breathe easier. Our aircraft-grade aluminum pipes are more durable than the stock plastic pipes and include our DuraCore™ boots to ensure all the boost your turbos produce makes its way into the cylinders and no power is wasted.

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Your 2017+ F-150/Raptor 3.5L EcoBoost is a tough truck that's capable of tackling anything from the jobsite to the dunes. Shouldn't you be able to say the same about the intercooler pipes under your hood?

Thanks for reading,
-Steve