Let me start off by saying Please stop this bickering. most of it does not pertain to this thread at all.
Jack please start your own thread that introduces your new intercooler and it will address the original complaint about your post here. I have not ever posted negatively to any post about Jacks intercooler, any coments i have made were only positive. Please offer me the same courtesy.
As for the core size, when i designed my intercooler i designed it with certain criteria in mind. I could have made it any dimension i wanted. I did not look at a competitors and say If mine is a little bit bigger then I am best.
These are some of the disign criteria we had to consider;
Take advantage of all of the space in the front of the turbo buick, use as much surface area as possable to allow the largest core that would fit posable. (our competitors are now following suit)
Do not make the core so thick that no air can get through it. It is true that the larger the core volume the better it can absorb heat. But you have to calculate the amount of air that needs to be cooled and the efficency of that core and size it accordingly. According to our calculations we are a way over kill with the core thickness that we have.
Why not have a thicker core than 3.15"?
To thick on a car that does not need it is simply a waste of money, adds unnecessary weight and greatly reduces flow through the cooler. This last reason is particularly a concern with cars that you drive on the street. this is how most of us use our buicks. If you have to thick of core then not only does it block to much air going to the radiator causing overheating problems, it also keeps air from going accross the core adiquately cooling the core itself.
Tony dequick's v1&v2 cores were 2 7/8" thick.
If you have a 1/4 mi only car which i consider to be 8 sec car or faster then a thicker core is necessary and only then do you begin to benifit from a thicker core. kinda like this one
http://rjcracing.com/RJC_Buick_Products/_New__Product_Developement/_new__product_developement.html
this is the IC460, it is designed for the select few that it will benifit from it.
there are many other things that go into designing an intercooler that must be considered. one of them is end tank design. As always i am looking at air distribution. how the hot air is distributed accross the core,of course it is best to distribute the air evenly across the core, We made several different temporary designs to see how the air was being distributed. What you design on paper and what actually happens is not always as it seems. We had low temperature probes on each tube measuring the temperature as we introduced hot air into the intercooler.We tried different shapes at the top end of the core to try and minimize uneven distribution. We tried having more area at the top, different angles, ect. most of the work we did focused with the top end of the tanks.
one thing that people don't really look at is clamp selection, the Standard T-bolt clamp i believe is lacking, although it holds the hose good there is more to sealing that hose than you would think. how close togetgher the ends of the clamp are greatly affects how it seals. the closer the better. We have spent allot of time trying to come up with a better alternative to these t-bolt clamps. This is something you would not see or even think about when installing an intercooler but if you are loosing boost through the clamps or any leak for that matter that means it requires more back pressure in the headers to create the same boost. this equals much poorer performance reguardless of MAT.
I could go on and on, Some people have accused us of releasing an intercooler without testing. that is simply not true. We have only not released all of our testing. every aspect of this intercooler from the clamps to the end tank design has been designed and tested and is the best possable design.
We always do our homework.
), or using 4 letter words to try and prove my point.
