Saw this on ebay.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Water...QQcmdZViewItem

A little rich for my blood, but pretty neat....
Jim

 

From the description: "Designed in mind by engineers for the Mini. Not a weekend project." By just looking at the picture all I can think is that they cannot be serious.

 

I think they got their 8 year old to type up the description.

 

Interesting what they did with the stock i/c - turned it into a radiator for the water to air...

 

Rumor is it works, but didn't make production due to cost. It's a lot more expensive than other W2A systems out there.....

Matt

 

I'm sure it could work; my comment is directed to the "engineers" and how "untidy" the installation is as well as the poor choice of reusing the stock intercooler instead of utilizing a properly engineered piece (both size and application).
What about pressure loss?
Who are these guys?

 

Considering how they designed it they could have made it a Air-to-air AND water-to-air. Grant it the air-to-air would be small but it would have contributed to managing heat and unique.

On another note guys (and i did post this earlier some place) I was watching some truck TV show and they were discussing IC units. The guy asked why air-to-air for in the past he had seen mostly air-to-water. The response was that air-to-water was in the past for it cannot lower temps as much as air-to-air. The air-to-water can only lower temps to the water temp which will always be higher than ambient air. Air-to-air not only can reduce temps further than air-to-water but is less complicated therefore is more reliable and less costly.

That was the gist of the TV discussion.

 

Then again (for those who live in California), there is the question of whether the I/C would pass the visual part of the SMOG test. If you fail the visual, you don't even get to try the sniff test....

 

The designer(I think his name was Rick) came by the Webb shop in October of last year talking about this. He seemed kind of arrogant about how it made all of kinds of power (not sure if it actually did). I do know he has been working on it for a LONG time though.

He did take a liking to the Gintani prototype we had on display at the time .

-Brian

 

(divertissement warning): I would certainly doubt the 17HP claims! The difference between the ambient temp and the intake temp (IC-out approx.) is called the "approach". The website frequently referenced on these topics says that an approach of 20F is really good. We have seen approaches of 10F-15F commonly reported here. In winter, I bet that most people are seeing no more than 20F approaches at most highway speeds. Continuous traffic-jam motoring might produce 60F, or lots of WOT might get you up there. But the recovery is surprisingly fast.
What does all this mean? IMHO, the IC is *not* the place to be spending lots of time and money in the MINI. Get all the "standard" mods, yes, but if you really want HP, you need to start with heads, cams, headers, turbos... All the other stuff is small potatoes.
And then there's handling mods...

enough, sorry. Back to normal transmission.