donromani

Thanks for the tips. Great post!

donromani

Wait, is the JHM hardware not so good then? That is what I ordered because I was under the impression that it would be a better kit than the ebay knock offs.

donromani

ok, where do I get this aftermarket power steering cooler? Can't find it at my usual shops.

donromani

Nevermind - I found it. Sorry to everyone for carrying on a conversation with myself...

complacentsee

Ohh it is good and super light. Just they are aluminum and will wearing through super fast if you let them hit any peice of metal.

complacentsee

It happens. You should see how often I've been doing it at work this week. Laying out the electrical system for a hospital. I keep confusing myself.

donromani

Oh, gotcha. I have plenty of heatwrap left over from wrapping the headers. I might just go ahead and do the piping as well - that should help protect them from wear a bit and it can't hurt to insulate them either.

Haha - good to know that the guy who does the wiring for a hospital is surfing the web all day.

B56

There has been a lot of debate as to wheather coating intake parts has any benefits. Personally, I would not use heat wrap to wrap IC piping. Intake pipes are supposed to dissipate heat. If you wrap them, you are trapping the heat inside the pipe and the air traveling over them from the force of the car moving forward will have less of a cooling effect if any on the piping.

Maybe try using some silicone hose pieces around the piping sections that you want to protect or just spend extra time properly fitting the pipes.

donromani

I can understand why there is a debate - I've considered this myself and what it really comes down to is which element of the system you are trying to maximize or minimize:

On the one hand you have the situation you described above, where you basically trap heat INSIDE of the pipes instead of letting the pipe serve as an additional section of cooling. It seems to me that this is going to be a bigger factor when you first start the car and the engine has not really started to warm up the rest of the engine bay yet. It is probably also going to increase the intake air temp a tad over what it would normally be when the car is standing still, because as you said, there is less surface area to cool the air.

On the other hand you have the argument that wrapping the intake components prevents the heat from OUTSIDE from warming up the piping. This is going to be a bigger factor once the engine has been at operating temp for some time and is radiating large amounts of heat and warming up all of the accessory engine components. At this point you will probably decrease the variation of intake air temps because you have insulated them from the heat given off by the motor.

I think both arguments have merit, and in fact, I think both are true, albeit at different times and to different degrees. At the end of the day I don't think it makes much more than a marginal difference in output, particularly if the more significant elements of the charged air cooling system (i.e. the intercooler(s)) are doing their job right.

Indyxtype

It's been a while since I took any physics classes so bear with me. I would have to think that with the exception of sitting in one spot for an extended period of time without cool air running over the system and the engine heat leaching out in all directions, the charge air passing in, through, and out of the intercooler is going to be warmer than ambient. The principle of an intercooler is simply a heat exchanger, much like a radiator or cooling fan used on a PC CPU. As such, it can never cool the system bellow ambient and therefore will always perform better the more exposure the system has to the ambient air. After all that is the idea of using a larger intercooler in the first place, to allow more exposure to the air around. If intercoolers and their piping benefited from insulation, than a larger intercooler would cause the intake temps to go up rather than down. The only place where I could see any benefit, albeit minimal, would be for the parts downstream from the intercooler, away from the front bumper, and very close to the engine such as those just before the throttle body, otherwise, the more exposure to the outside, the better.