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Anyone ever used an intercooler instead of a heater core?

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red89

New Member
Joined
Jul 9, 2003
They come in various sizes, but are generally much larger than a heater core. It seems to me they would flow much better then a heater core as well. Also, it should be fairly easy to seal up the inlet/exit and weld a couple of bungs onto it to thread some hose barbs into.

I know I can get one at the local junkyard for less than $50. But before I do has anyone else tried this?
 
Someone must have. An intercooler would work at least as well as a heatercore, as long as it is paired up with the right pump. Depending on its size, you may need more than an aquarium pump.
 
The thing is, usually they are aluminum, we don't want that, second if you DO get an intercooler, make sure you get a water to air unit and NOT an air to air as they are not designed to have liquid in them.
 
Some intercoolers look absolutely cool though. Too bad copper couldn't look like Aluminum instead of that copper color.

If it wasn't for the bimetallic issue they'd work great.

Let's see, use a water-water unit and place a an aluminum car radiator outside with a monster AC fan. There we go!
 
I' recently got a copper tubing one from my local scrapyard for a tenner (damn good deal). It works superbly. It's not like a heatercore though ( which has a big space at each end and the water can 'choose' it's own tubes to pass through the rad), instead; It split into 3 tubes at the entry and they run back and forth all the way through it until the exit where they join up again. This obviously increases the resistance.

However, don't worry about the pump. This thing is the size of my computer case and yet my Eheim 1046 could push water though adequately. Though it wasn't great and I got a Eheim 1250 instead. Though the difference between the pumps wasn't as great as I had expected and that's 'cos the head pressure between them isn't as great as the flow rate difference.

Anyway, yeah, it's well worth it. You can have supremely quiet fans on it yet still get a massive overclock.

The ONLY downside is that it's so big you have to find a way to mount in on the side of your case.

I'd post pics, but my bro's digi-camera has no batteries...


There's no for sure way of knowing if it has copper tubes or not because the tubes always look silvery cos of the aluminium fins attached to them. Bizarrely, I've heard that if it's painted black (liek mine) it probably has copper tubes, and if it's silvery/grey, it porbably has aluminium tubes. This is not due to anything physics like, but simply the black ones tend to be older and in those days they used copper. Nowaday they mostly use aluminium.

You can of course just inspect the inlet and outlet tubes, but you can only do thay once you've hacked it out of whatever car you've found (assuming you're getting one from a scrapyard).


Hope that helps.
 
I have just finished my water cooling setup today and it uses an intercooler from a land rover and it seems to be working fine temps are at 34C at the moment but its hot here so they should go down. The only prob i had with the intercooler was getting the 1/2" barbs as the intercooler pipes are huge. Also the intercooler is quit big and i have had to build a rad box as there is no way it would fit in a case.


Buzz
 
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