Intercooler delete?

[Mister T]

I posted this on passatworld but I thought I'd give it a go here too:

(B5 Passat 1.8T)

While I was talking with John from Alamo industries about porting my turbine housing he made an interesting point. It's possible that the stock intercooler may be acting as a bottleneck. Apparently if this is the case then it's efficiency is piss poor at best.

At some point I'd like to measure the pressure difference between pre-intercooler and post intercooler pressures. If I'm finding a significant drop I'm faced with one of two options. 1) I spend $500 on a FMIC That's going to tear up my front bumper and still going to drop my PSI or 2) eliminate the intercooler all together and run on straight water/meth cooling.

Now before you all hit the "you're going to blow up your engine" key hear me out. For $220 (boost solenoid included) I can get a safe injection kit that monitors the actual flow through the W/M line. If for any reason the flow cuts out it will actually dump all boost pressure via the wastegate line. I figured what I'd also do is split my lines and put a second, small 60 ml/min nozzle around where my intercooler used to be (in addition to the existing nozzle still by the TB)

Anyway, has anyone heard of someone doing this? Also, does anyone know how much air the stock intercooler can handle before it starts backing up?

[Mantis]

Re: Intercooler delete?

Get a larger side mount, Bell is always a good choice, no bumper hacking. I just dont think that you can realistically hope to run straight w/m and keep that charge air cool and safe

[Mister T]

Re: Intercooler delete?

I'll see what Danny at Snow Performance has to say. He used to have a 1.8T so he's pretty knowledgable about them.

[R_Ethug]

Re: Intercooler delete?

i'll sell you an S4 SMIC but i doubt its much bigger than your passat one

setup a dual SMIC kit like the a4s have

just suck it up and buy a fmic and get a good kit that doesn't require bumper molestation

[Mister T]

Re: Intercooler delete?

Yeah, I don't think the S4 intercooler will be much better. But thanks for the offer. As for the FMIC, unfortunately being a 'man of leisure' means that I can't readily plunk down $500 for a new intercooler. Like I said earlier, I need to see how big the pre/post intercooler pressure differential is. To be honest, if the intercooler has been getting saturated it might as well be gone anyway as it's efficiency would be virtually nil at that point.

[R_Ethug]

Re: Intercooler delete?

you'd be surprised at the difference an upgraded one does

going from my stock s4 ones to the RS4 ones made a huge difference for me.. no heatsoak at all this summer

[luunta]

Re: Intercooler delete?

reading this makes me think you're trying to convince yourself that you should just take the intercooler out.

not sure I'd risk engine heating for that, but it's your engine.

[Smartiepants]

Re: Intercooler delete?

Another thing to consider is the inherent pressure drop from cooling across the intercooler, not sure how much that would be, but it is something that would lower the pressure aside from the flow restriction.

[Mister T]

Re: Intercooler delete?

Finally managed to get a reading on the pre-intercooler side by tapping in a barb fitting. It looks like it's within about .5-1 PSI so that's within spec from what I can see. What surprised me though was that under part throttle I was seeing 2-8 PSI differences. I called Gerry from G-popshop and he said that that's most likely turbulence and that when I go WOT everything starts flowing and the PSI's match up.
That may explain the low end surge I get sometimes.

In other words, no IC pull. However, if I ever get $500 burning a hole in my pocket I may go to a FMIC. Anyway, it's been an interesting exercise. I'd still like to know if it would be possible and what would happen. If the intercooler is easy to pull I may pop it out one day and log what happens.