intercooler pipes

It goes without saying that the intercooling system is an integral part of any turbocharged vehicle. What's the sense of trying to cram more air into the cylinders if it can't be compressed that easily. In fact, that almost defeats the entire point of having a turbo installed on your engine. For those of you who have a craving to crank up the heat on your hot-Honda by lowering your intake temps, we already devised a solution for you. However, much like how your CTR transports you from A to B, your chilled charged air still requires a delivery method.

Until we can somehow devise a pipe-less intercooler system, ensuring that we improve on the stock pipes is always a requirement.

You might remember from our design plans post that we decided to ditch the plastic end tank construction and go with a full aluminum design better suited for the new, much more robust core. In doing so, we also changed the design on the inlet and outlet, rendering the stock piping all but useless.

Where the oval openings

When we're talking about cooling the charged air in any forced induction vehicle, the intercooler always steals the show. To be fair, it is doing a majority of the work. No matter if you're still running a stock unit or if there's an all-aluminum core seated in the front of your car, it's the star. However, the intercooler would be nothing without the back-up band, the intercooler piping. Putting in all the effort to cool off the charged air would be useless without a method to transfer it to the intake. If the stock intercooler unit had some shortcomings, the piping was bound to end up with some flaws, too.

The safe passage for your charged air is currently left up to the combination of plastic and rubber construction that makes up the factory piping. It might seem that we're prejudice against these building materials, but it's quite the opposite. These materials are great for the mass production of your Golf or GTI, providing an easily produced, lightweight channel for the charged air

This is truly the age of forced induction. A clear indication of the trend came with the release of Honda's 10^th generation Civic. After decades of abstaining from giving the intake manifold any extra assistance, we've been delivered a lifetime of naturally aspirated 4 and 6-cylinder engines, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The turbo-less times lead to some truly remarkable engines from the Japanese giant, but enthusiasts craving the extra boost and whine from a turbo or supercharger were left to their own devices.

While this might not be a 10th Gen, the 8th Gen is a popular platform for aftermarket forced induction kits. Owner Ian Palmeri wanted to ensure that what was going on under the hood matched the outward appearance of his FG2.

Coupled to the K20 is a 1.1l Eaton-style supercharger, bringing this 8th to well over 350 HP and 250 TQ. The 10th Gen's turbo setup might not come with that much power straight off the lot but the L15B7 does have the potential to reach similar numbers

The 2013+ Focus ST begs for more power. While it isn't the easiest thing to accomplish, our engineers are here to help give you quality parts that will help push your ST to and over the edge of high performance. As our release for our Performance Intercooler sits on the horizon, there's no better time than the second official day of summer "17 to tell you Focus ST enthusiasts that we are also developing upgraded intercooler piping to compliment it, because, why stop there?

Underbody shot of the stock intercooler piping on a 2013 Ford Focus ST

Tight fitment in this area, increasing the size there will be challenging

First, just by looking at the stock system, we knew we could make some significant improvements. All along visible areas of the pipe, there are few consistent paths of smooth airflow. There are size reductions, accordion-type sections and overall small piping that we know we can improve upon. The easiest and quickest way to materialize the ideas in our engineer's head is with

These intercooler pipes are now available!
Click here to buy them from our website!

As the old cliché goes, some things just go together like peas in a pod. Peanut butter and jelly. Cold beer and tailgates. Intercoolers and intercooler pipes; you just can't have one without the other. If you followed along with our 2011-14 F-150 EcoBoost intercooler thread, you've probably been waiting for an update on our intercooler pipes for a while now. Well, the wait is over.

Fabrication

In the last post, fabrication ended for our prototype cold-side pipe. Since then, we've been busy fabricating the hot-side piping and testing. Steve and Mike whipped up a hot-side prototype using the same process as the cold-side piping. Steve started by measuring the stock pipes using our ROMER CMM (coordinate mapping machine). Mike then used those measurements to cut and weld a set of prototype pipes.

The two pipes feeding the intercooler air from the twin-turbos are long and intricate, so proper measurements are

Enlarging charge pipes for your turbocharged engine must be a detailed and accurate process. Think about it. It's not like companies make a charge pipe kit that is well-designed, well-documented, direct-fit and requires no modification to, let's say, a twin-turbocharged LS1 V8 engine fitting 1995-1998 Nissan 240SX's. You are going to need a fabricator for that, a very good one. It will be a one-off kit specifically for the car brought into the shop, not able to be mass produced due to the unique setup.

You can't design good intercooler piping that fits a particular application for wide-scale production willy-nilly. Without the use of the proper tools, time, and R&D, the resulting product will be met with negative feedback from the surrounding automotive community. With the overall tight engine bay clearances of this 2016+ Honda Civic 1.5L Turbo, working around the space to design piping that will fit with a larger diameter than stock is a priority. Even slight miscalculations in the design

When it comes to data testing, our engineering department avoids cutting corners. Each product we put on the market is vigorously tested so we can be confident our products can withstand the abuse you intend to throw at them. With the intercooler piping for the 2016 2.0T LTG engine, we have gone through the proper steps to get the data gearheads want to see.

Our engineer put our dyno and flow bench to work to see how our design stacks up. We plan to offer these intercooler pipes individually as well as a kit, so both the cold and hot-side pipes had to be tested individually. The good news is promising numbers followed.

Flow bench data for our prototype intercooler pipes

The first thing our engineer wanted to do was analyze how these pipes affected pressure drop using our flow bench. While the cold-side pipe did not show any improvement, the above chart shows that the hot side intercooler pipe improved airflow by 20%, which means more air is flowing out of the turbo. Increasing the amount

Turbocharger compressors like denser air, which is why us car enthusiasts joke about how, although the winter is the motorsports off-season, it's peak "boost" season. Cars with forced induction love the colder, denser climates because by driving in colder weather, the turbocharger or supercharger gets fed a bit more air than in warmer weather. That's why you might feel a harder punch from the gas pedal in the middle of a freezing Chicago December compared to a Daytona Beach July.

Since we don't all boost happily in the Siberian Tundra, the way to replicate this effect is by finding a way to supply more air to your method of forced induction. One way to do so is by making your intercooler piping or charge pipes larger. Larger pipes allow more airflow, which translates to more power. Our lead engineer for this entire intercooler project is very familiar with this idea, before creating larger pipes, we must first evaluate the stock pipes - hot side and cold side - to know exactly what we are

When I was young, I had a serious tendency to become fixated on a specific item or experience. Starry-eyed and captivated, I'd stubbornly obsess over my desire-du-jour at the expense of appreciating what was going on in the moment - something that was lost on me at the time, but hardly seems unique now, among my generational peers (or even those decades my senior). It's a fault upon which I've improved vastly with age and "wisdom", but I regularly notice reflections of the same tendency beyond the scope of my own experience, even regarding one's attitude to something as simple as Chevy parts.

You see, although this phenomenon tends often to be associated with my generation, I would argue that its application extends much more broadly to human nature.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard my aunts, uncles, and parents rehashing their college days, often followed by "I wish I had taken advantage of X opportunity or done Y thing - I was just too focused on Z!", I'd have enough money to