First please dont be mad about that blurry photos They still show what you need to do. lol.

Tools required:

-ratchet set with 7mm, 10mm, 13mm, and 6in extention. Most complete rachet sets will have these.

-Phillips head screw driver

-Flat Head screw driver (2 would be very useful for those clips)

-10mm cresent wrench, small adjustable cresent wrench (helps to get those tough to reach 7mm bolt undernieth)

-automotive work gloves with grips(very important for getting good grip on those charge pipe couplers)

-a Jack and two jack stands (not sure if its necessary but certainly makes things easy)

-some plastic ziplock bags (for organization)

-A helping hand (very important)

-Time (A full free day is best, that way you have no pressure)

INSTALL with bad PICs



1. PLASTIC CLIPS - Open the hood and start undoing the plastic clips on the top of the bumper, under the hood. Two flat head screw drivers to pry the black clips up works pretty well. place all the clips in a labeled ziplock bag, write bumper on bag.



2. HEADLIGHT - Start unbolting the headlights (edit: grey bolts that connect the headlight to the bracket). The head lights are held in with two 10mm bolts to a black headlight bracket. take those bolts and place them in a labeled bag.

Popping the head light out is alittle tricky if you hadnt done it before. I find the best way is to wiggle it and try popping out the headlight from the corner part. This can be done by kind making an motion similar to opening a door (pivoting motion). once you have it Free disconnect all the connections to the headlight, I have HIDs now but if I recall, there are three connections on the passenger headlight and four on the driver side (one is for the Ambient Temp Sensor under the headlight. becareful with that.


3. HEADLIGHT BRACKET - Time to remove the headlight brackets. They are held in by four 10mm bolts. Two on top and two near the bottom. The headlight bracket is the black plastic scaffolding that holds the headlight in place. You might have accidentally unbolted the bracket in step two since I didnt specify which bolts you need to unbolt for the headlight. These bolts are black and should be plainly visible. Now remove the black headlight bracket.


If you dont take out the bracket before going to step 5., It is very difficult. see image below. Very tight fit to get a rachet in there.


4. BUMPER SCREWS - For this step I lifted the car and put it on jack stands for ease of working. There are a series of 7mm screws, and plastic clips similar to the ones on top of the bumper, under your car that you must unscrew.

Most of the screws can be unbolted using the ratchet with extension but there are two 7mm bolts on either side near where the tires are that dont have a space to squeeze the extension by so the small adjustable cresent wrench comes in handy here.
There should be a total of six 7mm bolts to unbolt under the bumper (unless your car has many dealer visits then you might only have 4 or 5 screws... possibly not even 7mm hex, could be phillips or flat head ). Three bolts on either side. See picture below about what I mean by a gap available to get the extension by and how the one closest to the tire does not have the gap.

NOW, there are six more 7mm, again if you had many dealer visits some of these screws might be missing You need to unbolt the three in the tire wells on either side. To make this easy, can turn the steering wheel to get to them easier which is what I did ontop of lifting the car.

WARNING: DO NOT TRY TURNING THE WHEEL WITHOUT THE KEY IN THE INGNITION AND IN THE "ON" POSITION WHILE CAR IS LIFTED. You can lock the steering wheel in place which makes it very difficult, you will also not be able to turn the key. With the key in the ingnition and in the "on" position, the power steering kicks in. if you didnt lift the car START THE CAR and turn the steering wheel. Again you do not want this pain that I went through .
Should you have locked the steering wheel just turn it as hard as possible in the direction you were turning it and you will feel the steering wheel give alittle and the key can be turned.


There are actually four 7mm bolts in the tire wells, I believe the bottom one does not need to be unbolted. It only holds the front lip to the bumper.

 

5. BUMPER BRACKETS - This is alittle tricky. There are 3 10mm bolts on either side of the bumper but you only need to unbolt one of them completely on either side. The other two bolts just need to be loosened. See pic below of me loosening the bracket bolts.

See pic below of a close up of how the bumpers is mounted You can see the the back bolt actually hold the bumper in place while the other two hold the bracket against the bumper clips. I removed one bracket instead of loosening it.


Here is a pic with the bracket in place and just loosened to remove bumper.


THere are two more clips to remove. They are kinda difficult to get to and I didnt take any pics . They connect the bumper to the crash bar.
They can be seen by looking through the grill where the IC is and looking at the top just behind the grill. You can slide a flat head screw driver through the grill and try and pop them off. a second person helps here... They can reach through the opening where the headlight use to be and rotate the clips so the flat part is available for the screw driver to work the clip.

6. TAKE IT OFF! - Have your friend carefully hold one side of the bumper while you hold the other. Wiggle the bumper off. If its not coming off check to make sure the Hood latch and rubber hood bump stops arent in the way . If it still feels bolted some where, give a quick check around to make sure you didnt miss anything.


7. REMOVE THE STOCK INTERCOOLER - First thing to do, and having the car lifted really will make this easy, is LOOSEN the stock couplers.

You will see them under the car and there should be space for you to use a cresent wrench to loosen the T-bolt clamp.

Pry a flat head screw driver between the plastic endtank inlet/outlet and the rubber coupler. Wiggle the screw driver around to "break the seal" between the coupler and endtank.

Yank away to get it off. It will come off. If you are having issues, loosen it more and use the flat screw screwdriver to try seperating the coupler as you pry it off.
Once you get the couplers off on both the inlet and out let.
loosen the two bolts that hold the Intercooler to the Intercooler mounts. Then unbolt the intercooler bracket from the crashbar.
Take the stock intercooler off.

AND NOW FOR A BREAK.
Go grab a beer. and check out these photos of the stock IC vs the TR8 IC.







BACK TO THE DIY INSTALL.

8. MOUNT TRE BRACKETS AND ELBOWS - Simple step No need to explain this.




9. REMOVE CRASHBAR - Move the IC bracket clip that looks like this, see pic below.

slides out like this

Use the Ratchet with the 13mm and an extension if you want. unbolt all six 13mm bolts holding the crashbar. Have the friend help.

Remove crashbar.

 

10. INSTALL TR8 - First line up the IC with the "inside" crashbar mount points to make sure it lines up ok. Next, with the help of a friend, hold the crashbar and IC up and sandwich the IC between the crash bar and crash bar mounting points. Make sure the bolt openings line up and start threading the 13mm bolt through. tighten down the bolts while checking to see if the crashbar collides with the IC. If it does, see pic below




^I couldnt bolt the crashbar down all the way SO, SOLULTION
Take IC off. BEND the Aluminum IC brackets so that the IC sits further back.

WAH-LAH! It fits.


Re-install everything back the way you took it off and your done. Make sure the couplers are tight like a tiger! (Note: If you flared your 90* elbows like I did, it can be difficult to get the stock rubber couplers on. Again you can use the screw driver and slide it around while pushing to squeeze the stock coupler over the flare.
see Pics below of me flaring the elbows.... This step isnt exactly necessary but if you wanna do it, go for it.)




^I only bent it out at five points.

^As you can see that coupler aint letting go now.
YOU SHOULD ONLY DO THIS IF YOU FEEL YOU REALLY NEED TO DO IT. lol. Dont do this flaring methods should your 90* elbows already have the lip. I only did this to make sure they dont let go.
Also figured out my camera setting were wrong, lol. Heres what it looks like in HD!!!



DONE

Enjoy your new IC.

 

Thanks Cuda, I'll get getting mine bead rolled tomorrow and installed then too... if it doesn't snow that is

Hate to say it, but wouldn't this be better off in the How to Section

 

Awesome write-up. You da man!! I love the pic-heavy write-ups. Are you selling your stock IC?

 

No way. Lol.

 

Your right. I wasn't even thinking. If a mod comes in here could they move it? I'm guessing this DIY would pretty much work for any intercooler.

 

Awesome write up, I'll be referencing this when the weather warms up and I install my TR12.

Just one thing to add. When you remove the headlights, instead of unplugging all the plugs on the back of the headlight, isn't there just one plug that disconnects the entire headlight harness from the main harness? Not a huge deal, just makes it a little easier and reduces the risk of breaking a clip.

 

Damn Cuda, nice write up and pictures man! This looks much easier than when I installed then intercooler for my Gti. I'm excited more now for this intercooler now with this DIY. Thanks bro!!

 

Good stuff dude. I hope you like it as much as I like mine.

 

yeah, thats more than likely true, lol. I had my HID kit for over 8 months now so im used to taking them out and I forget what the stock harness is like

Definately love it . It does what I need it to do and I will never have to worry about exploding endtanks

 

i say you redo everything and get good pics... jk ill use this when the time comes to swap out my ic

 

very-very nice write up but i have a question.....

i see the tr8 is taller than the stock but not as long, because we dont have a huge opening in the lower grill were the ic is, wouldnt the air thats hitting the front serface of the ic( top inch or 2) be blocked a little by the top of the lower grill/bumper???? im sure its still get air but not 100% of what it should be getting????? idk ya get what i trying to say? im new to the ic,turbo thing so bear with me and dont hate please.

 

yeah, the top top maybe 1.5 inches is blocked.... meh, the rest of the intercooler still does its job pretty good.

Probably the best way to fix that is saws all you bumper and crash bar
Im tuned now but after work I will record some IATs, hopefully being tuned doesnt change tooo much with IATs. I will have the combo tune on by the end of the week so I can get stock data with the IC.

That will never happen I did this Friday and my legs and back are still killing me.

 

lets put it this way..

We'll subtract that 1.5" from the cubic volume equation.

stock IC ends up 542.5 cubic inches for the core when multiplied out.
This IC is 600.6 cubic inches when multiplied out.

If I subtract 1.5" in height from the core... its then 6.3" x 22" x 3.5" = 485.1 cubic inches

still slightly bigger than factory and from what I understand, the best cooling property of oversized ICs is that they are thicker than the factory, giving more surface area for the fins to exchange heat from the bars.

All the other ICs out there that you can get are also 3.5" wide.

 

I found it quite easy to install lmao. but then again we had a lift and all air tools. what you know about breaking a t bolt clamp with air tools? lmao luckily i did upper and lower charge pipes at the same time so i had extras...

 

So how did it feel copared to the stock intercooler. Does your butt dyno tell you it pulls harder and more linear?

 

I honestly cant tell a difference. When I first got the IC on. The car had the stock tune. It felt as though it went through the rpms faster than before as I hit redline alot earlier than I normally did... lol

You guys know how the rpm needle has trouble keeping up with the actually engine speed? Rpm lag>

It seem worse after this install. Then the car figured out what the hell was going on and it pretty much learned it down. Now the car is tuned and its rediculous. I doubt I would notice if the Intercooler increased the power. lol.

 

sugestion on bending the ic brackets.... mount them to the crash bar without the ic mounted to them then bend them to where they ned to be.... takes five mins.... tryed to bend them wy clamping them to a table and this was a pain in the ass... o yeah dont tighten your tbults to tight on the piping you will crush it!!!

otherwise feels good.... think the ic works great...

 

I tightened the t-bolts tight. I don't think I crushed the tube

 

does the 05 2.0 lsj ss come with an intercooler or is it aftermarket?

thanks for this thread ill be removing my bumper this summer and was just gonna try and figure it out myself this is a huge help!

 

LSJs have a heat exchanger for their supercharger. The LNF is turbo. Its different unless you have yourself a turbo swapped LSJ. As far as taking the bumper off its probably very similar to to this so good guidelines to follow

 

^^^lifts are awesome, and excuse me for using an air ratchet damnit...lmao

Install wasn't bad at all. Now I know what to do when I decide to get one


I spy mikes bumper...and intercooler removal

 

Well on a stock tune i'm sure i woudlnt feel anything either just cooler IAT temps in logging.

you know i kinda noticed this when i was gunning the car. The needle showed 6k rpm and hung, when you can go like 6.2 about. i was like woah that seemed weird. I guess it does lag hahaha

So with the tune it didnt seem to pull more linear as the power was always there instead of building up to it at redline.

 

If you think the car is fast stock... wait til you drop a tune on it. It's a real eye opener. The intercooler works well and really shines after multiple pulls.