Ok I was at a "gathering" of friends and I meet this girl who says she has a 97 eclipse turbo. I kinda didnt believe her at first because there was no intercooler, so I asked if i could look under the hood and she said sure. So I take a look, and then, of course, there sat the turbine.

So I guess really the question I wanted to ask is, is it absolutely necessary to intercool when you turbo?

 

if it was a stock intercooler then it would have been near one of the wheel wells. i remember when i used to go to the junkyard for dsm injectors i would see the stock eclipse intercooler behind the wheel well. and no, there are some people who dont use an intercooler on their turbo setups, but they dont run a lot of psi either.

 

so what would be like the max psi one could run without an intercooler? like between 5-10?

 

you might be able to run 5 psi without one, it really isn't advised to run a turbo with no intercooler, it's just not a good idea. I'll bet anything she has a stock turbo with a side mount intercooler

 

agreed

 

 

No, it's not necessary to run an intercooler if you go turbo. It's also not necessary to run premium gas either. That being said, they are both fairly simple and cheap methods to prevent detonation inside your cylinders, so pretty much everybody that goes turbo does both. With a mixture of cooler air and higher octane fuel, you can push more power out of a boosted motor with less risk of failure.
As for how much PSI one can run without an intercooler? There are way to many variables to answer that. For one thing, power is a better measure of what a boosted motor can handle than PSI. A tiny turbo putting out 8psi would put alot less stress and make alot less power on a motor than a larger turbo also putting out 8psi.

 

3000gt also used the side intercoolers by the wheel well as well. Volvo did the same back in the day. I think the max was about 5-6psi without using an intercooler.

 

no, it is not necessary to have a huge ass FMIC

 

you can run any boost level you want to without an intercooler. The function of an intercooler.... be it an air to air or whatever, is to cool the air that is heated up by the compressing process that occurs with a turbo. Cooler air is more dense, and that makes more power. And that is why people use intercoolers.

 

all the intercooler does it cool the air which is going into your burning chamber. do you need one? should you have one? yes

 

yeah i know what they do and why people use them, i was just making sure they werent "something extra" that people didnt necessarily need. that whole experience just really confused and perplexed me.

 

there are 8-second buicks without i/c's and trunks full of meth.
can't sleep on something just cuz it doesn't have a shiny grin.

 

yea, meth injection works great, but more pricey sometimes, or some people use a combo of the 2

 

are you referring to the grand nationals they made back in the 70s-80s?
my grandfather was telling me about a friend of his that had one back in the day. supposedly they were teh first american car to utilize a turbo.

 

Grand nationals were bad @$$

 

The 86 GN 3.8L Turbo was the fastest American production car for that year. It beat the crap out of the IROC Z and the Corvette for 1986. A friend of mine had one. It was fast as shit through a goose, but heaven forbit you push the cigarett lighter in while the A/C was on. That thing had more electrical issues than any car aside from a Saturn, that I have ever seen.

It sure was a fun car to drive as a 16 year old in the 80's.

 

yeah, i remember when GNs were feared in the 80s. def bada$$ and they were pretty rare.
no, there's a guy in our forums that messes with old grampa buicks, lol. i was just using it as an example of non-intercooled turbos, which of course aren't limited to any make/model. this car sprays pre-turbo, which is nuts:







here's one that eats big-power supras
http://www.mirdrag.com/v2/results/20...tm#WILD_STREET

 

sorry for the thumbs:

 

That is a radical setup... Love it!

 

crazy

 

Wow