Well i just got off the phone with Chris over at Whipple and i got him talked down to $1600 shipped for the complete air to water I/C kit. Includes blower attachments, pump, heat Xchanger, intercooler, hoses, reservoir, and harness. Thats $400 less than he quoted me the first time. Is that a decent price comparatively speaking to other air to water kits available? The good thing with the Whipple kit obviously is that its a direct bolt on, no fabricating anything. Other than that I am trying to weigh out the pro's and con's of an air/water over an air/air kit. I could build a kit with a copy-cat spearco Air/water I/C for about $1000 but would need to fabricate all mounting hardware, and locate a feasable place for thr I/C itself (The Whipple I/C is designed to sit atop the intake manifold). Also would need to fab up the piping and plenum adapters for the blower and intake. An Air/Air I/C would be less money but would still require some fabrication of the piping and mounting of the cooler in front of the radiator somehow. The DMax I/C could probably be fab'ed up and installed for around $700 after all is said and done.

Which would better suit my needs, Air/water or Air/Air? I could always increase the efficiency of the Air/water with a larger heat Xchanger down the road if i needed to right?

 

tough call, you ever look into water/meth kit?
Ricky

 

Air to Air is more reliable and alot less maintance. But Air to Water can cool better and is better for racing. It all really depends on what your needs are. If it's a DD truck then Air to Air would probably be a good choice, JMO though.

 

Air-to-air will never not work.

 

Why not?

 

Well, not never. It would not work if you drove through a flock of locusts and the fins got plugged up, killing the cooling airflow. I'm sure there's other scenarios that would keep it from working. But air/air would be a lot closer to never not working than water/air, simply because it has no moving parts.

 

Air/Air works just fine but in very hot weather its efficiency is decreased and you can never get it below ambient). With the air/water you can simply load up the tank with ice or ice packettes and really cool things down for each run (IE below ambient). Obviously this is a track only thing and on the street people always argue about the efficiency of air/air vs air/water. Just make sure you do it right and have a good size tank the first time so you dont end up like me and retofitting a new tank and drinking coolant cocktail.

 

I like air/air with meth personally. The air/air always works, like stated above and then the meth lowers temps even more (below ambient) and also, this is the biggest reason I like meth, it adds octane when I need it, so I can run cheap gas and decent timing. Honestly, if I could only have one, I'd go with meth, but that's me.

 

Only having 1 as a choice I'd go Intercooler :p Meth only doesnt seem to drop IATs quite as much and you have to dump loads of it when you dont have an I/C helping. But like you said, both is where its at

 

Isn't methanol sort of like Nitrous?