Intercooler experience

[cleffe]

I've found a lot of threads summarizing which aftermarket ICs are available, but not much regarding people's actual experience with them. Can someone who has installed and spent some time driving with an aftermarket IC post their experience? Do you notice any benefit after a few hard pulls compared to the stock IC, or is there not much noticeable difference?

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[superj]

@Goosetuned just went over intercoolers in a post he did. search under his name and it should pop up

 

[Tallonh]

put the cvfab intercooler and charge pipes in mine from the bronco kit. Had to remove the lower shutter took about 3hrs to install. Got some of my mileage back after I did the level, bigger and heavier tires. As for hard pulls and such without tuning idk how much of a difference it would make but I was mainly chasing mpg's anyway. Id say pending what gear the trans is searching for (the tuning on these is mediocre at best) feels like maybe a little more boost lag from no throttle. Also im in the 2.7L v6 that things pretty quick anyway.

 

[CrushTon207]

I installed the Cobb last week. I am going to make a more detailed post at some point but here are a few initial observations.

With the Cobb in general driving Air Charge Temps (ACT) are around 10F higher than Intake AIr Temps (IAT) whereas with the stock intercooler I was generally seeing a 20F difference. I have yet to be able to see 130F ACT in any situation with the Cobb whereas I could get to 130F with the stock intercooler with two hard pulls in a row.

Its still spring where I live and ambient temps have been pretty low, 40F to 70F, so I haven't seen how it will perform as ambient temperatures get up to what I would call hot. I do have concerns about low speed cooling as temperatures rise.

The Cobb intercooler does not utilize the rear shutter assembly. If you haven't looked at how that works you should. The rear shutter assembly includes a seal that seals the rear of the intercooler to the fans and allows the fans to suck air through the intercooler. I would imagine this would help cool things down at low speeds in high ambient temps.

The Cobb intercooler does seem to cool down acceptably quick after it does warm up even at 20 to 30 mph which is something I was concerned about. It should be noted that I was surprised at how little the ranger actually gets into boost under normal driving conditions which should help keep things cooler with either intercooler, although I was also surprised at how much vacuum this truck makes when off throttle. My theory is that under vacuum no air is passing through the intake so IATs and therefore ACts will rise from engine bay heat until you get back on the throttle a little bit and start to draw fresh air through the system.

I will continue to observe as things get warmer here and report back if I see issues.

Please not that all of the info I have provided is anecdotal and I have not done any structured testing.

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