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| Here’s the intercooler. As the name implies, unless you want a fried engine, you’d better pay special attention to this beauty. The front body had to surrender its place in order to get it hooked up. Fortunately, since the body panels were plastic, this was fairly easy to accomplish. | |
The front end would have to come off, along with the two front quarter panels, in order to install the intercooler, along with the veritable forest of hoses and tubes needed for it. Although we weren’t quite ready for the actual installation just yet, a dry-fit helped us see the areas where additional work would need to be done. For starters, the bottom brackets on the intercooler had to be trimmed off and new ones fabbed along with padding for it. The bumper support brackets had to be trimmed to make room, and some... adjustments had to be made to a few of the body panels to allow for the intercooler’s tubing. Time to fab all this up? Well, we weren’t exactly holding a stopwatch, but if you have some experience with welding and cutting body panels, expect to spend a minimum of five hours toiling away. Don’t worry, it’ll be worth it.
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| This is one of the bumper supports. To make room for the intercooler’s bulk, some cutting was in order. | Here’s where the MAS connects now. See the hole next to it? The one that isn’t there? That’s where ProCharger had it going. We say, why cut when you don’t have to? Far better to connect the MAS to a (thingy) for a hose that’s going to be moved anyway. |
On the engine side, there was more work to be done. The Mass Airflow Sensor harness was a bit too short, so it had to be lengthened, and installed into the system, via more modifications.
Okay. So far so good, but there's still a lot to do. Now that we’re done with the prep work, it’s time to move onto the nuts and bolts (har, har) of the venture.
Or at least, it will be when Part Two of this story goes live. Patience grasshopper. All good things, and all that.
And after the installation is done, and Missouri gets spring weather, we’ll take it down to the track and put it through its paces. Stay tuned.
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| Matt Johnson Performance 3326 Woodson Rd,
Overland, MO (314) 426-3500 |
ATI ProCharger Accessible Technologies, Inc. 14801 W. 114th Terrace, Lenexa, KS 66215 www.procharger.com |