- So you wanna turbo your car, classic. You wanna be a boost creep. You wanna make a bunch of cool noises, make a little extra horsepower and make a bunch of
dudes in a parking lot, think you're cool. Trust me, I get it, but it
can seem so overwhelming. There are so many parts. How do you know what to buy? How do you know if it's
gonna work together? Sure, bolting a turbo to
your engine is sweet and all, but you gotta cool the
air that it spits out before it gets to your engine. That is where an intercooler comes in. But how do you know how
to choose an intercooler? Are there different kinds and what kind of
considerations should you make when choosing an
intercooler for your setup? Well, that's what we're
gonna be working on today. We're going to be working on the cold side of our little turbo setup. We're gonna be installing our intercooler, all our intercooler charge
piping and our blow off valve. And along the way, we'll
talk about what all of it is and how all of it works. I'm Zach, and this is Money
Pit Turbo Kit part four. Let's get cooler. (upbeat music) Huge thank you to Ridge Wallet for sponsoring this week's episode. If there's anything that I've learned over the past few weeks, it's
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time is of the essence. (alarm sounding) Oh God, I guess that's it for me, it's time to get back to 2077. If you thought 2020 was
rough, I got bad news. (explosion sound) (Zach makes gibberish sounds) All right, so we already
know that turbo works by using your exhaust
gas to spin the turbine, which also spins the compressor, which makes a bunch of boosts, crams a bunch of air into
your engine and makes power. But the air that comes out
of the turbo is gonna be hot. and hot air is less dense, which means it carries
less oxygen than cold air. So the idea is that we cool that air that comes out of your turbo down before it enters your engine, so we can make it cooler,
make it more dense, make it carry more oxygen so
we can make more power baby. Well, that is what an intercooler does. Let's take off this front bumper and look at where this thing's gonna go. (upbeat music) Where's that coming (mumbles) Top of the box. - [Eddie] Yeah - Are we good? Hey, plenty of room. So the intercooler is
going to go somewhere in this vicinity. And basically the idea is
that one way or another, we need to get the air
to go from the turbo into the intercooler and
then out the intercooler and into the engine. So it's going to be a little bit work, but before we get into the work, let's talk about intercoolers and what the different types are and what you should be thinking about when you're looking at intercoolers. So there are a couple of
different types of intercoolers. The most common of which being
the air to air intercooler. Basically it relies on air
flow to flow through it, ambient air to cool down the charge there that's inside of it flowing
through these tubes. This is probably what
you're most familiar with seeing on the streets
and things like that. This is what's called
a bar in plate style. It's just in reference to
the way that it's made. It's a bunch of bars and
plates welded together to make channels for the
hot air to flow through with a lot of channels for
cool air to flow through it and extract the heat. And then there's also tube
and fin style intercoolers they're going to be more
common in OEM applications. They look more like a
traditional radiator. There is a style of
intercooler that is better than both of those at
cooling your charge air. And that's a water to
air style, intercooler. Basically it passes your charge air through a series of cooled
tubes using a cooling. The problem is that they are
kind of complex to install, especially if you don't
have water to air cooler from the factory. So like if we wanted to
put a water to air set up on this car, we'd have to
install a separate pump, a separate reservoir. We'd also have to install
a radiator upfront. So it's kind of a complex setup. So for that reason, you
don't see them all the time on the aftermarket. That's why this air to air bar and plate is probably the most
common thing out there. Okay, so let's actually take
a good look at the intercooler that came with our CX racing kit. This actually looks decent. All the fins are straight. The welds look not too bad. Fin density is pretty good. Basically the more fins per inch here, the longer air will be kind
of trapped in these fins and kind of the more cooling it'll do. Usually you'll have a
little bit less fin density on the charge paths in there because the more fins you
have in your charge air paths, the more resistance to
flow there will be in. You don't really want
much resistance to flow in your intercooler. You want this thing to flow really well. Otherwise you're just gonna end
up stressing out your turbo. So I mean, this thing looks pretty good. This size seems about appropriate for the horsepower we're
going to be making. When you use the intercooler
that's bigger than you need, you lose some pressure from
the inlet to the outlet. That's what pressure drop is. Is the difference between
pressure at the inlet and the outlet. A good intercooler is going to have a really low pressure drop of
like one or one and a half PSI or even the lower than that. A bad pressure drop is like
anything North of three PSI. So a good intercooler won't
lose very much pressure and you won't stress out your turbo. You won't create all that extra heat. So it is all about air flow, but how do you know how
much air would be flowing and whether or not that
works with the intercooler you're thinking about? there's at least one calculator
that I know of online, where you can roughly
estimate horsepower to CFMs. Okay, so horsepower will
estimate 260 at the crank. And that equals about
180.44 CFMs of airflow. So now that we know that we
can go to CXRacing's website and look at the info they provide us. So basically what we want to do, we're going to look at this
graph and on the Y axis, we have CFM cubic feet
per minute of air flow, and on the X axis, we
have PSI of pressure drop. 180 CFMs puts us just over
three quarters of one PSI of pressure drop. Now, like I said earlier,
anything below one or even one and a half is pretty good. At just over three quarters
of one PSI pressure drop at our airflow, that's
actually spectacular. I hope it's true. So with all that said, I think we can go ahead and
try to hang the intercooler. They did include some brackets, so maybe it won't be too hard and maybe we won't have to trim anything. I really have no idea. There are no instructions. So, we'll find out. (upbeat tune) Well, I think we're going
to have to lose ACDs this as it's supposed to
be this, what is this? The receiver dryer or something, whatever this tank is up here, obstructs the intercooler
from going where it should go. These brackets should meet
up with these bolts up here, I think and they can't. I mean, this is kind of the
way this sort of stuff goes. You might have to trim some
stuff or remove AC altogether to make room for stuff
like big old intercoolers. Hmmm, all right AC. Damnit, it's time to come out. - [Eddie] Top for a time-lapse. - Yay, montage baby. (bright upbeat tune) Ahha Okay, so we got the AC removed, which actually I'm pretty excited about, freed up some room and we've
got our intercooler hung. So now that the intercooler's there, it's time to talk about
intercooler piping. That's pretty simple stuff. It's usually made out of
aluminum, sometimes silicone. This kit came with intercooler
piping that is bent and cut supposedly to fit the Miata. So we'll see how it fits, but this is something that's
also pretty easy to do with like a DIY kit that you just get a bunch of random bends
and lengths of pipe, and then you can kind of cut
it to fit your engine Bay as you need to. But the trick is you see
these raised edges here, that's a bead rolled edge. And when you're running a turbo and putting a lot of pressure
in your charge pipes, that bead rolled edge
is what lets the coupler and the hose clamp or a T-bone
clamp really lock on there and keep from blowing off
when you're making boost. So if you're cutting up your own pipes, that's kind of the trickiest part is getting the bead roller on there. You can buy a tool to
make these bead rolls, but it's about like
150, 200 bucks or more. But let's talk about the size of it. You might think you should choose the biggest size you can
fit because more airflow. Well, to a point that is sort of true, but if you choose an
intercooler piping size that is too big, it's just
really ultimately more volume that you turbo has to fill
before you reach max boost. It just increases turbo lag. So it's important to not go overboard on your intercooler piping size, similarly, to not going too
big on your intercooler. So I think these are all two and a half with a smaller pipe
coming out of the turbo. That's pretty common. I believe that just kind of promotes flow towards the engine. I think that's really about all there is to talk about intercooler piping. So now, I'm going to install it. - [Eddie] For shorter business. - Is? - [Eddie] for what is it? - Oh, I see. Well, so actually, all right, so we ditched the air bags
on this car a while ago when I did the steering wheel and also the airbag
module pooped to the bed shortly thereafter. So this airbag sensor up
here kind of lays in the way of where the intercooler
piping is going to go. So I'm just gonna get rid of it. (tool falls on the ground) Whatever. All right, now that's out of the way. Then we're going to have to cut a hole somewhere in this vicinity. This stuff's probably
going to need to move accompanying the shaft. See... Well as expected, we
do have to drill a hole and like kind of this frame apron area. To do that, I'm going to
have to take the fender off. Hey, remember those things. All right, so after consulting the comprehensive instructions, which consists of like a couple pictures, pretty sure we know
where to put the holes. So now we just got to put it. (drilling machine starts) No going back, baby. (drilling machine working) We did it. Now we just gotta paint this
bare metal, so it doesn't rust. Okay, now with a nice new hole, the first pipe connecting to
the outlet of the turbo is on and comes over out here. So now we're ready for the
next piece of the puzzle, which I think is this one. So the idea when you're setting up a intercooler piping routing, is just to make it as smooth as possible and as short as possible
with no unnecessary bends, just you know, to improve flow Well, so a little short
and I can't really move the intercooler any closer this way. This is about all we've got. So you can see the pipes
hitting pretty good right there. I think we might have
to do a little bashing. - [Eddie] Should have done it. - Nah- - [Eddie] You wouldn't do it. - We're gonna, we're gonna bash a little more carefully today, Eddie. (bashing the equipment) All right, so after
referencing the instructions a few more times, I did realize this pipe
was in upside down. This fitment looks ridiculous, but I guess this is how
it's supposed to be. Does meet up, I mean, we're doing it. We're in business. It looks crazy though. So we're just gonna keep going and move on to the other side, get the pipe that holds
the blow off valve in and try to get the thing
connected to the throttle body. So to get this side of the
intercooler piping done the side from the intercooler
to the throttle body, I needed to add a three eight
NPT bung for our IAT sensor. So I took this home last night and welded a little bung in. It's not super pretty, but it will work. So now we just got to put
this thing down in there. I do have to figure out one little horse for idle air control valve,
but shouldn't be a big deal. So let's get this on, and then that's it for
our intercooler piping. We've got a turbo attached to our engine. See if she fit. - [Eddie] One second. - It all links up. We are connected to our throttle body. I don't think that the routing of this intercooler piping is the best. It's a little long and a little bendy, but it will get some
boost into the engine. So that's pretty exciting. Now there's one thing left
that we need to install today, and that is the blow off valve. Eddie do it. [Eddie makes gibberish sound] Yeah that one. First off, what is a blow off valve? Well, it's basically a
pressure relief valve. You know, your turbo's
making a bunch of air and slinging it into your engine. But you know, that's great
when you're on the throttle, but as soon as you get off the throttle and close your throttle plate, while there's a bunch of compressed air trying to run into your engine and it's hitting a wall. So what happens then basically
all that compressed air has nowhere to go and it can do significant
damage to your turbo. So you gotta make sure you
have a pressure relief valve. Whether that's a blow off
valve that vents to atmosphere or one that recirculates it
back into the intake track, doesn't really matter. It does the same job. The atmospheric blow off valve that we're going to be running, is the kind that makes the most noise. So that's the good stuff. But you generally need to be running some sort of a map sensor. If you are running a maf, it's
usually a lot more difficult to run an atmosphere blow off valve. We have a standalone
ECU with a map sensor, so we're going to have no problem running an atmosphere blow off valve, and it should sound pretty cool. Let's look at the one
that came with the kit. It doesn't weigh very much. I mean, this is a really
cheap knockoff blow off valve, but the idea is that we
connect a manifold vacuum to this nipple here. And basically anytime you
shut the throttle plate, the intake manifold goes
into extreme vacuum. So as soon as this nipple
sees that extreme vacuum, the valve opens and
relieves all the pressure in your charge pipes. It's really simple. It's pretty cool. And it sounds awesome. All right, so a different blow off valves will have different flanges, which have to meet up with
your intercooler piping. This is a gritty style flange, but there are a few different types. So you gotta make sure
you get a blow off valve that'll work with whatever
charge piping you have, whether that's OEM or
aftermarket like this. (bright upbeat tune) Beautiful. All right, now we just need
to get the vacuum nipple on the blow off valve
hooked up to vacuum source at the intake manifold. (bright upbeat tune) I keep getting the same... (bright upbeat tune) All right, the supplied vacuum
T teed into a vacuum line. Now we've got a vacuum reference
down to our blow off valve. So with that, our cold
side is pretty much done. The intercooler's in, all
our piping is in place. We've got our holes cut, it's all installed and we've
got a blow off valve on. There is legitimately a turbo
connected to this engine now, and that's pretty exciting. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned a thing or two. Come back next week when
we're going to be doing fueling on the Miata, so
we can get that much closer to actually ripping this
thing on the streets. Thank you so much for watching. Follow me on Instagram @Zachjobe and follow donut @donutmedia. And I'll see you guys
next week for part five. Goodbye.
