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Will this work for an a/w intercooler heat exchanger

910 views 5 replies 4 participants last post by  Hauk 
#1 ·
I am putting together an air to water intercooler for my car. Im going to be using the st205 core. I was having a lot of troulbe finding a suitable heat echanger for a front mount. Most of them were either radiators that were way too big, heater cores, or oil coolers that were too small, or transmission coolers that were too restrictive. Well after hours of aggrivating searches i found this on ebay and bought it.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=7949844518

I know it is probably not ideal, but it was about all i could find that was not too big, and had decent size plumbing (size 12 an). I know being a Setrab, the quality will be top notch, but im not sure how effective it will be for this application. Ideally i wanted something around 20x10x1.5" This is only 6.5" tall. Does anyone have any opinions on this? Will it be sufficient to be efficient (lol i didnt mean for the odd wording!) Anyways any input is appreciated.
 
#2 ·
will it work? well yeah.. lots of things will work.
it it good? not in my opinion. (but this is just my opinion, not that its without logic, but it is still one man's opinion.) i would not use an oil cooler of any variety for a exchanger. its a waste of space comparitively. oil coolers use large turbes to flow the oil through, since oil is a much thicker fluid than water. if you want the best heat transfer, use a radiator made for water. it will pump the water through much smaller passages, giving better cooling. in a equal-sized core, the water core will blow an oil core away.
why degrade your system? why are people so obcessed with using oil-cores? why does hardly anyone pick up on this logic? i have no idea. but i see it all the time.

as far as a choice for a good sized front mount water radiator? i was planning on using a motorcycle radiator as soon as i find one that has the right inlet and outlet setup, and fits where i need it to. i also gave thought to standing up my radiator a bit, and sliding another full size one in front of it. perhaps just something thin out of a civic or something. if i didn't have a/c on my car to begin with, that would be ideal, in that i could just toss the factory a/c core in the front and use it perhaps.. or another stock radiator?
lots of ideas... no time to work on my system... we'll see how it goes.
 
#3 ·
As far as oil coolers are concerned, the setrab ones seem to have a much higher passage density than the cheaper tube and fin variety. From the looks of it, i would think that the passages should be somewhat comparable to a radiator. Notice that setrab uses 12an connections on this, instead of the much smaller 3/8" barbs found on cheaper coolers...Extra volume to compensate for the smaller passages... But just looking at it, it is built more like a radiator than an oil cooler.
 
#6 ·
I have heard that you cannot keep the A/C while using the st205 heat exchanger. I don't have that exchanger anyway, and they dont come up for sale too often. I will do some testing with a pyrometer once the system is setup, and let eveyone know the results. If its not sufficient to pull heat then I will look to other methods i suppose.
 
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