"My first attempt at working with fiberglass so forgive the ugliness."
And the OE unit is much more beautiful?

Bottom line does it work better?

 

On the louvers topic....check this site...

http://www.raceace.com/products.html

I think it would look nicer if they were part of the hood and the color of the car.
If I had some "stones" I'd buy these on E-bay http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Dodge...07737367QQrdZ1and cut some holes in my hood..

 

Yes.
Cruise temps haven't changed or at least changed enough to be statistically significant. What I have noticed though is that recovery times are reduced.

Unfortunately this isn't something I thought to log prior to modding the diverter. So all I can say is I watch the temps a lot. I have done dozens of measured runs and more that I didn't record so I have a good "feel" for times but can't prove a darned thing. So it'll have to be a "how much do you trust me" subjective thing

It makes sense to me. More air over(through) the IC should extend rise times and reduce fall time. At a steady state it really shouldn't matter unless I had uncovered and reduced a significant flow restriction of some sort.
I had mentioned this bit in an earlier post, I think, that I had also improved on the top entrance of the diverter. It used to rest on a raised lip in the throat of the opening. I trimmed the diverter back so it sets behind and below this metal now. More CFM = Goooood

 

What about just cutting out the center of the diverter(around the foam seal) and then using foam/ sealer around the topside of the diverter to seal it to the hood?

 

Great thread. I'm new at this so please bear with me.

Damn good job on the fiberglass, esp if it was your first time.

Since the discussion is about air flow, etc. has anyone covered up the 4 large hols under the front of the bonnet? You can see 2 of them on obe's picture above. I have an '04 MSC that has these holes uncovered. It's my "understanding" that MINI now makes black plastic covers for these and they are stock on the '06 models. I heard that the gave an increase in HP since they don't allow the air to go into the bonnet, but rather redirects the air.

Any ideas?

 

Funny. There's a HUGE old thread, recently revived(was that you??) on MINI2 about this very thing.
I drove around with painters tape covering these holes for at least 2 years.

Now that I have decent IC temp gauges I may just try that again.

Thanks

BTW...Never did feel any performance difference

 

You don't know how close I was to doing that very thing.

That's pretty much how I made the mold.
I used aluminum tape to shape the hole and get me the radius along edges and then layered fiberglass over it. The Al tape worked well as a release agent.

This I can take on/off pretty easy though which was important to me.

 

MY '05 came with plastic covers over these holes, which I removed when I installed the M7 Ram Intake. Never got around to putting them back...and never noticed any difference in performance, but my **** is not calibrated, so maybe it's true...?
btw, here's another "see through" photo of my intake-diverter mod:

cheers,

 

I have had this on for a while. As Obe, I have no solid data. Tuesday it was 107 in the sun in the heat of the day & recovery time was a pleasent suprise. This thing seems to work pretty well. Can't do any real side by sides since the weather, day to day, is not consistant. I've noticed that just the time involved in changing unit to unit is enough time to bring the under hood temps right up. As a result I just look at day to day ( no science involved - wish I haden't sold the IR gauge )

Thank you Gandini, JATO, Jet Assisted Take Off or a good name for a cat

 

Bolding added by me.

That's why I stick to steady state cruise inlet/outlet readings and base thermal efficiency. They're pretty easy to duplicate or report on.

Is your stock diverter still in place on the hood and would removing it allow you to increase the volume of what you have going on now?

 

Sorry I've been busy as nuts at work lately... so I'm going to be tossing lots of questions now that I have a minute... bare with me.

First off... obe... awesome job with the fiberglass.

Holes? Am I blind? What holes?


That looks like some amazing solid (and bling) construction. Professional. Does the top rest on the bonnet at all?
Is there any space between the scoop and the opening to the diverter?
How did you shape it?


>>>>>>>>

General question: Would it be better to have more air capacity (utilizing the whole stock scoop area) or to just have the area open above the IC?

(I can do another work image if that made no sense)

We should all meet up someday with tools and test equipment in hand on a deserted road and spend all day tossing beers and ideas back and forth and testing new designs on the road. (of course... trying to get WI, IL, VA, TX, and NM in one location might be tough... Dragon next year? Maybe have a DIYers tent or event!)

 

"Is your stock diverter still in place on the hood and would removing it allow you to increase the volume of what you have going on now?"

It's out. It's been out for quite some time ( since the contraption was first put on - 2 almost 3 weeks ). The good thing is it's been real hot & I've been swaping back & forth, Alta - Contrap, a day at a time, the bad news is its been real hot. Recovery time is what I can see & I have some OE data that is a good baseline. What does all this mean to me? The OE unit keeps large wood chips, bugs, birds, hornets, rocks, possibly some water and other objects from getting in the the under hood. It does function as a scoop forcing air to the IC, just not what we want. As you have seen with your mod, recovery time is faster & there is room for more air to cool everything, not just the IC. You may not think your mod is beautiful but to me if you see cooler temps, I see beauty.
Did you put a different IC on your car?

And yes there are many things I can duplicate but the side by side thing, on the same day does not cut it.

 

"Holes? Am I blind? What holes?" I think your car came with plastic covers over them. When you open the hood look at the bottom of the reinforcement above the front grill.

"That looks like some amazing solid (and bling) construction. Professional. See the attached file thats what I do
Does the top rest on the bonnet at all? No
Is there any space between the scoop and the opening to the diverter?
How did you shape it?" Yes, a little more than 1/4"

To fab this up, the base was made first, then modeling clay was used to get the clearances ( which is very hard to find now, I guess kids like to eat it, It tastes like crap ).

I think this started with insulateing CAIs. Another post in the past. Anyway, looking at the OE diverter in the hood, I took it out, went to S&S, got some dry ice, wraped onto the IC with a thermal blanket, sealed it with food wrap as fast as I could and.... Wow did that work, if only, for about 10 minutes.

I think Obehave was the first to actually build a diverter, from scratch, that had some good result. Gandini has also put some time into the project with his modified Alta, remember the killed OCC install thread, and more. I'm not sure that we are all looking for the same thing but more eyes are making progress.

 

I agree Steve--I think that generally we're all after a grail, but each looks a little different. Living in hot New Mexico, I'd like to reduce intake charge temperatures, but there seems to be lots of ways to achieve that:
(i) cold air intake, sealed with top or open
(ii) lower SC pulley ratio - not so much temperature, but less boost.
(iii) better IC - clearly the DFIC is the way to go here, but price and backlog
(iv) improved IC cooling - what we're doing here
(v) cooler head via lower temperature thermostat
(vi) lower under bonnet temps via exhaust/header coating (ceramic/wrap)

My objective originally was to fabricate my own diverter, but as soon as I saw the Alta I realized I could modify it to achieve the goals I had set for my own. I also got the M7 Ram Intake at the same time.
My biggest concern is heat soak--all that metal under the bonnet just gets hot and hotter. My wife thinks I'm crazy because I raise the bonnet upon arrival home from work--I just feel that I'm helping my poor car to cool down after a hard drive home.

Anyway, I like the idea of getting together for a day of tests and brews.

cheers,

 

A DIY IC mod club? Cool idea

Sorry couldn't help it.

For me, I have the larger GRS Motorsports IC.
In the interest of full disclosure I'l mention again that I chopped up the GRS diverter Made it a bit more "personal".

To answer You need to make sure you get as much air as possible through the IC.
A very good seal is very important. I had posted earlier what a big difference this can make. So has TonyB.

Next is getting as much air in front of the IC as possible.
Scoop and diverter mods and the DFIC all try to address this issue.
For me the jury is still out on the DFIC. Not due to any lack of faith just lack of data. So no assaults please

 

Here's my home made IC diverter. Nothing too special about it; I just didn't want to pay the Alta price. I made it to work with the stock plastic piece + foam on the bonnet. I guess I don't see the value in removing bonnet part. In fact, the stock plastic part steps in towards the IC to force the air thru the IC -- basically the reverse of the air gathering vane on the diverter itself. Speaking of this, I used two vanes, the rear one twice as high as the front one. I also added some foam on either side to augment the stock sealing foam.

One thing I did that might be new is to remove the two front brackets that hold on the IC. These prevent the diverter from sitting flat on the IC, so air could be lost on the edges (unless you add a gasket there). Another good reaon to remove these is that the diverter can then be extended towards the front of the the car, and it goes under the black plastic scoop extension. This keeps air from going down under the diverter (basically shankrabbit's concern in the original post). I did make an under mount bracket for the left side of the IC to replace the stock over-mount.

It is hard to tell if the new diverter has made any improvement in power. I'm hoping I can make some IC efficiency measurements this weekend. After I do this, I'm going to remove some of the plastic "mail box" slot to open it up. Now that the diverter goes underneath this, I can remove some plastic without losing air.

 

Man... looking at all these custom diverters makes mine look GEH-TOH!

Hehehe... I love ghetto.

 

You know what, you are making the effort & you may find that there is something there that works well & share it with us. I made plenty of things that looked good but worked like crap.

 

1 thing I found was simply removeing the OE diverter from the hood allowed more heat evac after running the car. Have your wife ( crazy? ) near the car after a couple of hours of driving ( hood up ). Even when it's cold outside ( 20s ) there is a lot more heat than you would expect. Your 6 goals pretty much sum it up. Heat is the problem.

I likke Obe's DYI - How To Spend Not Much Money & Drive Your Family Crazy Center, HTSNM & DYFCC for short. Damn that reads well....

 

Just want to add to this interesting thread:
... below you can see a photo of the slightly larger charge cooler from the GP modell.
As you can see, the cooler is a bit longer as well as the cover. The plastic cover under hood seems to remain the same as on standard MCS.

 

Keep the ideas comming, inimmini, minti, who's next??

 

Amen to that

 

Thanks for the support!

I've actually found that hunk-o-love to work really well by means of me touching it after a long drive and it feeling cooler then with the stock diverter. In fact it still sits on my IC.

I've decided I'm going to take it to the next step and either get it professionally done or buy to proper tools to do it myself. Once I get the final one built, I'll do some actual tests on it.

It actually doesn't look as bad as that picture, I've made other big changes to make it look better and perform better. I just found the worst looking image for humors sake.

 

The GP IC clearly extends back over the sparkplugs further, like the Alta and the GRS coolers. Other than that...seems like the bonnet diverter is the same requiring that funky cowl to get air to the extended rear IC fins.

cheers,

 

I finally made a couple of attempts to measure the effect of the IC diverter shown in post #216 on the IC efficiency. Rather than pierce the boots, I found I could just loosen the clamps and slide the thermocouple wires inside the inlet and outlet IC joints (see pic).

On my first attempt, I had very little time, so I couldn't go too far from home. I decided to take some readings under brisk but brief acceleration, up to about 5500 rpm in 3rd gear. This proved to be difficult, as the inlet air temp to the IC is highly dependent on boost, which in turn is pretty sensitive to the right foot on the gas pedal. I made 7 runs with the stock diverter first, and as the engine warmed up, the max in/out temps steadily increased from 186/95 (F) to 220/107. Even so, the IC efficiency held nearly constant in the 77 to 80% range - quite a bit higher than I expected. Air temp was 73 F. I only got 3 runs in with the new diverter, ranging from in/out of 202/111 to 214/104. This gave efficiencies of 72 to 78%, or no better than stock.

I suspected that the short, transient test may be strongly influenced by the heat capacity of the IC itself, rather than heat transfer ability to air. So, tonite I made some runs on a highway at 65 mph in 5th gear. On some long gentle hills, boost was running 10mm Hg vac, outdoor air temp 86 F. Stock diverter efficiency ranged from 55 to 68%, typically with inlet air temp of around 125 F, outlet 102 F (59% eff). After switching to the new diverter, inlet air temps had gone up to 128-129 F, apparently due to heat soak while I made the switch. Outlet temps, though were 98 - 99 F, or around 70% efficiency. The SC cooled off a bit after driving for ~ 5 min, and the last reading with the new diverter was 125/94 (79% eff), which I believe is the most directly comparable number to the stock diverter tests.

Overall, I'm satisified that the effort on re-working the diverter paid off. A home made diverter might truly be the most overlooked bang-for-the-buck mod! I believe I can still get a bit more air into the scoop by cutting back on the black inner plastic piece, which narrows the inlet more than it needs to.