Rep Power: 424

Ah yes, boost can be dirty
Just bolted up the new intercooler, and I must say, I'm spent.

I got sick of all the damn pipes rattling around in the frame pass through, no room, too many pipes and they were so damn long.... so when I had the new one made, I backdoored the hot side of the IC. Took at least 3 feet of piping out of the system, the IC is 7" tall and I can use the whole thing (its not a U)... the trick was I made use of that space behind the bumper.


I stole a page out of Greddy's book and did the up and over pipe. The design of it is actually pretty good if you direct the air right. The air goes in from the top and feeds down, across the air passages. This spreads the air out more evenly and only forces it to make a single turn. The outlet is parallel to the core passages, it keeps it from hitting a wall and having to turn too hard.
Greddy's requires you to remove the crash bar. I was hell bent on not removing it. In total, I had to remove a section about 4" long and about 3/4" deep in the bottom rail of the crash bar to pass the elbow through. Their pipe is centered on the tank... I offset it towards the back of the intercooler so I could keep the crash bar intact. Then I made use of the channel to run the pipe. A 2" pipe will lay right in that channel with room to clear the condenser.




Ignore all the couplers, all this stuff will be welded. I needed to figure out how to run all this, and sort out where to break the pipes so they went in. The only thing thats a pain is that the charge pipe needs to be assembled with the crash bar off, then the IC/pipe and crash bar all bolt to the car together by re-attaching the crash bar to the frame.


And now the fun... the backdoor.
Instead of going down and around, I went through. I drilled a hole in the radiator shroud, which as far as I can tell has 0 structural significance given that it abuts the frame rail which is boxed in. It seems all it does is keep air from passing by the radiator. The pipe never leaves the crash bar rail, it just turns backwards and passes through the shroud.

On the other side, its a matter of turning it and aiming it at the turbo




And yes, It came out looking nasty


I havent decided what I'm gonna do with the paint job.I may leave the core black and the tanks polished, or I may just black it all out.

 
Rep Power: 290

looks good. makes me want a turbo, the there's no way that's happening anytime soo.

 
Rep Power: 305

put something in front of it and keep ur car a sleeper, lol. Don't show it off. At least i wouldn't.

 
Rep Power: 328

Nice work man! BTW my tranny exploded 2 days ago

 
Rep Power: 249

Flat black that thing

SLEEPER

 
Rep Power: 389

pretty damn nice. I'm suprised you were able to yank out that much piping!

How long did all that end up taking?

 
Rep Power: 273

i'd say paint the end tanks black too to give that sleeper look. but i think it looks badass with just the core black and end tanks polished!

 
Rep Power: 353

more pixs of ur car boilermarker1 !!!!!!!!!!!

 
Rep Power: 293

that looks soo bad ***!!

 
Rep Power: 288

clean bro.... love the way you ran your pipes, never seen that done here. good job!

 
Rep Power: 369

Genius....sheer genius. I swear BM1 is my Civic hero.;...it seems I've been getting a lot of mod inspiration from you lately bud.

 
Rep Power: 424

Its hard to tell. My tools rebelled on me, so a lot of stuff took longer than it should have. First the dremel went, making the crash bar trim take a while longer than expected. Then my cordless drill crapped out, so I finally gave up on it and drove it across the garage and ran the hole with a corded one. Obviously with the car in pieces, I couldnt go anywhere for new stuff. I wound up using a drill and drilling enough holes in the crash bar to smash it out then clean it up with a grinder. Since I'm not supposed to be working on the car in my apartment's garage (it doesnt actually say that anywhere, but everytime I do it they yell at me) I had the car stashed in the corner and was doing it here and there so as to not attract attention.
It probably took me 5-7 hrs to rig it up, but it always takes me longer to do stuff like this because I need to think about how to do it and line everything up before I start hacking stuff up.

 
Rep Power: 350

Did you ever consider switching to a slimline and doing a true backdoor? I have yet to see that done on an em2 but have been thinking for awhile that I'd love to do it.

 
Rep Power: 424

A couple things stop the real backdoor for me.

You'd need to flip the turbo compressor to face left. To have the room, you'd need to pull the PS and probably the AC compressor to do it.

To shorten the radiator core (and condenser) to pull it through the hole, I'd need to make the radiator fatter to keep the coolant supply the same... I havent tested it yet, but I already have overheat worries about taking this thing on the race track, but there's not much room backwards to fatten it (the turbo is already notched into the core support). It probably also means no more room for AC condenser.

I need another manifold, DP and compressor housing (there's an elbow welded on mine) to allow for the flip.

If I went crazy, yeah I'd think about doing a true backdoor, the piping gets so short the response is even more immediate, but to make it happen is a little too over the top for me to go with it right now.

 
Rep Power: 300

get some better engine pics

 
Rep Power: 331

changing your clutch is gonna be fun...

 
Rep Power: 585

at first i thought u were using ductape at first then i kept scrolling down....shewwww! nice job though

 
Rep Power: 0

Nice work. YA more engine pics.

 
Rep Power: 424

Nah, the duct tape was holding that styrofoam thing onto the front of it.... it was easier to just cut it than peel it off.