do you think your intercooler was too small? or the piping? i cant off the top of my head remember the dimensions but the intercooler looks much bigger than yours. and im running 2.5in piping. my temps were very low before meth and after went below ambient. we are finally after a long winter putting the car backtogether and hopeing to make a little bit of power with it.

 

The real solution is putting a better intercooler core in the stock intake manifold, something like what the ZR1s are using and the LSA engine

 

you rly need to do some before and afters w/ the dyno

good luck w/ yours

 

if you are sticking with water/air and the stock blower location, then yes. But it's not necessarily cost worthy for everyone.

 

After all this... the person I hate listening to the most, yet he's right 99% of time.

Area47 said the stock manifold is not the restriction... leave it alone. Cooling mods are not the recipe to making big power.

After my fun experiment... I'm going to have to agree...

 

can't deny facts. 50-60 cfm gain from stock manifold to the saab intake manifold. hmmmmm..........

The thing is, it's just not cost effective for people sticking with a blower to ditch the laminovas in favor of something like a spearco intercooler. Some have still done it though.

 

Forgive the dirty picture (only one I have uploaded and was right after I had picked up the car which was in storage for a long time), but intercooled (technically aftercooled) centrifugal blowers can be very fun even on a small displacement four.




From looking at the LSJ's intake manifold and intercooler design I'd suspect it is the other way around and when mated to an efficient Roots-style (i.e. TVS) or twin screw blower the same Laminova cores in a better flowing manifold would work better than trying to change the intercooler cores in the stock manifold design.

The Laminova cores in the LSJ (which GM also used on the older supercharged Northstar) are a better, more efficient core than the conventional tube-and-fin pancake style exchanger cores used on the LSA/LS9 V8s, but for packaging, intake design (and probably cost reasons) those conventional cores work fine on those engines when matched with Eaton's high-twist blower lobes which produce much cooler discharge temps. Put one of the older generation blowers like what the LSJ used on those engines and the same intercooler cores they have probably wouldn't be cooling so well.

 

Ahh.. u have the vortech kit they dont make anymore!

My friend just picked.up that car... handles rly rly well

 

I fail to believe that if Lamovas are better they stopped using them on a car which power was the absolute goal and cost was not a concern, that being the ZR1. The cobalt was originally slated to have a spearco type core from what I've heard but was ditched at the last min to cut costs.

As far as cost goes, I dont care how much it costs, if someone made an intake manifold that works and cools correctly eliminating the majority of the heatsoak I'd pay $1000 for it, because god knows I've already wasted far more than that trying failures such as 3 diff heat exchangers, dual pass plates and even the ZZp single pass manifold.

 

laminovas are definitely not cheaper than a plate/fin style HE. i think the sizes used in the cobalt run $50 per core. They are amazingly efficient at cooling too. IMO the ZR1 uses what i does due to size requirements. It already needed a bulging hood to clear the HE as it is...

 

$40/laminova........Cobalt & Ion ---> ZZ Performance

 

$40, $50, same ****....i was close. lol

 

with shippin =p

hmm what happen to
jr's blower thread?

 

I killed it. I'm just doing those two kits. Maybe 3 if someone buys the 3rd one sitting on my floor lol.

 

i dont have a stock intake manifold anymore so i cant do any before and after dynos, but i can compare my car to most of the other ones and the temps are way down from everyones... thats what i wanted because ill be going to the track soon and lap after lap i wont have heat issues

 

Yep, I've still got two and have owned three of them over the years. I bought a new old stock Vortech kit to put on one of my '04 SVT Focus and then came across a pretty good deal on a car that I've known the previous two owners from one of the big Focus forums for years and it already had the blower installed along with some nice suspension upgrades and a Quaife.




It also uses a much more efficient blower and doesn't need to run as much boost/rotor speed. I bet they did test a setup with Laminova cores but if a less expensive solution works just as well for the application and meets all requirements you can sure bet cost is a factor in any car, even super expensive sports cars. Another thing to keep in mind is they'd also have to use more and/or larger Laminova cores and routing the cooling for the cores might be tricky on such a big intake manifold that's on that engine family.

 

^ exactly.

im a fan of laminovas, but i understand why OEMs dont use them more often

 

awww i didnt even get a chance to know the results with it >_<

 

yea, I was just aggravating you. lol

 

how did I miss this ****** thread???

 

Beats me...

Consider it one of css's few gems of hidden info

 

idk man. looks like we were looking for gems, but just found another rock. lol

 

Just because a used part is cheap does not mean that O.E.M. is cheap.
I can guarantee that a bar and plate design would be better more efficient but the lamnovias where smaller.
why dont you try to make a intake manifold with a bar and plate heat exchanger in it. see how that works.

 

laminovas are thermally more efficient than plate and fin exchangers, but they dont have the same airflow, so they're better for low-flowing designs (such as enough flow to support a 200hp cobalt, not a 650hp corvette)
Ifyou had 15 laminovas in parallel on an LS motor, it would be amazingly cool, but lets be honest...15 laminovas? Thats not very compact nor cheap. Thus, the plate/fin design wins

 

we made a plate and fin style intake manifold and it worked great so we went with an air to air setup and it worked better.