Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback
The purpose of the Sanborn compressor mentioned in my previous post was for an intercooler system for the supercharger. My son wants us to build our own. - And he wants to chill it with an air conditioner system. The gains are supposed to be substantially better than an intercooler that uses recirculated water. They do sell intercoolers that sit between a 6-71 blower and the blower intake but they raise the supercharger another 4" higher. He wanted us to incorporate one into the manifold itself.
I dreaded the idea of chopping into this intake. I've had it for almost 40 years and I think it'd be easier to find a long crossram intake than another one of these. But I gave it to my son to use so it's his call.
We started by inspecting the intake for the best locations to drill holes for our tubing to run through. The front has the distributor and the pop off valve. That meant we would have to run our lines in through the rear. When we examined the support structure inside of the manifold we knew we were somewhat limited on where the tubing could be run. We marked our holes, center punched them and drilled them out.
We had a few 20' rolls of 1/2" aluminum tubing that we'd bought for fuel lines. We thought we'd use it to create a coiled cooling system.
The openings on the top of the intake were too small to reach your hands into but you could get your fingers and pry bars through them. At first we thought we'd be able to keep forcing the tubing through one of holes we'd drilled and make it snake around the manifold's center supports without much problem. Our goal was to make 3 circuits around those center supports.
We quickly discovered that the aluminum tubing tended to kink when bent. We bought some spray silicone and a long 3/8" diameter spring coiled drain snake to run on the inside of our tubing as we made our bends.
We shoved the tubing in through the first hole and kept feeding it in as we attempted to make it bend around the center supports. After an hour of fighting it we only had two competed coils formed inside the intake and it didn't seem as though we'd be able to make a third. We decided to start over. That's when we discovered that we were unable to pull the drain snake out of the tubing. The malleable aluminum had more or less formed itself onto the spring so tightly that we would never be able to extract it. Damn!
Our next approach was to cut the top of the intake enough to allow us to form the tubing above the manifold and install it from the top. We used an air grinder and a Dremel tool to chop it up. I tried not to remove any more material than we had to. The plan was to weld the sections I cut out back into place after we installed the tubing.
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The purpose of the Sanborn compressor mentioned in my previous post was for an intercooler system for the supercharger. My son wants us to build our own. - And he wants to chill it with an air conditioner system. The gains are supposed to be substantially better than an intercooler that uses recirculated water. They do sell intercoolers that sit between a 6-71 blower and the blower intake but they raise the supercharger another 4" higher. He wanted us to incorporate one into the manifold itself.
I dreaded the idea of chopping into this intake. I've had it for almost 40 years and I think it'd be easier to find a long crossram intake than another one of these. But I gave it to my son to use so it's his call.
We started by inspecting the intake for the best locations to drill holes for our tubing to run through. The front has the distributor and the pop off valve. That meant we would have to run our lines in through the rear. When we examined the support structure inside of the manifold we knew we were somewhat limited on where the tubing could be run. We marked our holes, center punched them and drilled them out.
We had a few 20' rolls of 1/2" aluminum tubing that we'd bought for fuel lines. We thought we'd use it to create a coiled cooling system.
The openings on the top of the intake were too small to reach your hands into but you could get your fingers and pry bars through them. At first we thought we'd be able to keep forcing the tubing through one of holes we'd drilled and make it snake around the manifold's center supports without much problem. Our goal was to make 3 circuits around those center supports.
We quickly discovered that the aluminum tubing tended to kink when bent. We bought some spray silicone and a long 3/8" diameter spring coiled drain snake to run on the inside of our tubing as we made our bends.
We shoved the tubing in through the first hole and kept feeding it in as we attempted to make it bend around the center supports. After an hour of fighting it we only had two competed coils formed inside the intake and it didn't seem as though we'd be able to make a third. We decided to start over. That's when we discovered that we were unable to pull the drain snake out of the tubing. The malleable aluminum had more or less formed itself onto the spring so tightly that we would never be able to extract it. Damn!
Our next approach was to cut the top of the intake enough to allow us to form the tubing above the manifold and install it from the top. We used an air grinder and a Dremel tool to chop it up. I tried not to remove any more material than we had to. The plan was to weld the sections I cut out back into place after we installed the tubing.
View attachment IMG_4949.jpg
View attachment IMG_4957.jpg
View attachment IMG_4956.jpg
View attachment IMG_4952.jpg
View attachment IMG_4955.jpg
View attachment IMG_4959.jpg
View attachment IMG_4964.jpg
View attachment IMG_4965.jpg
View attachment IMG_4963.jpg