Jeremy Fearn Power Upgrade

I am considering purchasing a power upgrade of some sort for my TD5 Disco, I have heard of Jeremy Fearn and he seems pretty respected. The kit on offer is an upgraded intercooler plus power chip conversion which ups the bhp to over 190 from the standard 136. At £1000 is it a good buy or are there other cheaper options that will do the job?

Andy

Reply to
Andrew Cooke
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Andy Hi,

I would suggest you also speak with Andy at Allisport

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His direct e-mail address is snipped-for-privacy@allisport.freeserve.co.uk

I bought my first intercooler made by him back in 1996 when he was working for another intercoolers specialist and I have been in touch with Andy since then. The Land Rover Club of Greece and I on a personal basis have been cooperating with him for many years now and he really does know how to extract more bhp and torque from your Landy (and other cars also)

His kits are cheaper than most of other tuners but his workmanship is up to the lever of objects of art.

Give him my regards of you contact him.

Take care Pantelis Giamarellos LAND ROVER CLUB OF GREECE

Reply to
Pantelis Giamarellos

so Andrew Cooke was, like...

Just had his chip and intercooler upgrade done on my 300Tdi Disco. Quite a lot of money, and a modest though useful improvement in power, although less than I hoped it would be. Best improvement is in towing, where it will now hold top gear (it's an auto) for much longer. Workmanship is very good, and a very tidy installation.

He will want to test drive the car afterwards, and you may not like the way he does it. He certainly won't be getting the keys to any of my vehicles again.

Reply to
Richard Brookman

If what you are concerned about is him putting a lot of wellie in, how else is he supposed to test a power upgrade? Considering that there's a new intercooler, new tubing and new pump settings, it's got to be tested otherwise you might find a tube blowing off while towing a heavy load up a hill.

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

He could put it on a dynamometer to do a proper test. Perhaps that is what he does. This would indeed seem 'cruel' to the gentler folk among us. :-)

Huw

Reply to
Huw

Could do, but you'd get people moaning about that too, and also bear in mind that for the product to work, it needs the airflow so you'd need the truck to be moving. You could try blasting it with fans that can generate up to 90 MPH winds, but you'd have to match the fan speed to the vehicle speed, as otherwise at lower speeds you'd be getting more cooling than you would in real life etc etc etc

Basically just get in it and put the wellie down!

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

Plenty ways. I think Richard was more concerned about the driving technique.

Imagine a sort of hyper Alan Titchmarsh, who obviosuly knows his own 'back garden' and insists upon driving the lawnmower at full pelt around the thorny rosebed - whilst blindfold - with you strapped to the front, naked...

Reply to
Mother

Sounds like "Fearn" is a concatenation of "Fear Nothing"..

That's the kind of imagery that makes me mess my pants, whether front or rear I'm not prepared to reveal.

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

Does the vehicle fan not work then?

You could try blasting it with fans that

I think you misundertand how the intercooler works. It is not dependant on vehicle speed, especially on a LR which might be towing 4 tons hard up a long mountain hill in low ratio.

A driver can feel the extra power in this way but he doesn't need to be rough while doing it and it will not provide an objective measure for comparison. Not that I am against this, but a thousand quid would indicate a better measurement. I chipped my own X5 and Range Rover in this way and am quite satisfied with the extra performance and [surprisingly] economy. Since I did it myself and it cost less than £400, I don't care that I haven't got a proper measure of the increased power.

Huw

Reply to
Huw

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:23:03 +0100, Mother scribbled the following nonsense:

Picture would have been better if you had suggested Charlie Dimmock.......

Reply to
Simon Isaacs

vehicle speed will affect the intercoolers operation.

The point of the intercooler is to cool the air running through it. This obviously works better when the exterior of the IC is cooler. This will stay cooler when there is more of a draft over it - such as the one caused by travelling faster!

I'm not saying that you have to go at 90 to get the best out of it! - depending on the design and positioning of the IC it probably reaches a maximum efficiency level at a slower speed than that.

With an intercooled car, you can increase perfomance by fitting a proper frount mounted IC (so it gets more airflow), or by fitting stuff like IC misting kits (where water is sprayed over the outside of the IC to keep it cooler and get rid of the heat better)

Reply to
Tom Woods

On or around Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:23:03 +0100, Mother enlightened us thusly:

If he'd been driving my vehicle like that, with me in it, I'd have been inclined to demand that he stop pronto, let me drive, then while changing over from passenger to driver's seat, accidentally lock the c*ut out and drive off.

The above, naturally assumes a factual account of the incident. I have no reason to disbelieve what I was told, however.

Some years back I was in uni in Aber. A certain gentleman was the tranport officer for Aber Rag, and I was one of their drivers - they like mature students as they're old enough to go on the insurance when they're in the first year, and thus not too busy. I was once driven somewhere by said chap in one of the transit minibuses, and in my honest opinon, he drove far too fast, on a single-track winding road. He was also heard to boast of being able to drive, in a laden minibus, from Aberystwyth to the (Severn) bridge in 2 hours 5 minutes. I could do the same in 2 and a half hours, and I wasn't going slowly. Someone mentioned this boast, to which I said that he was a fecking nutter, OWTTE. This was reported back to him and he took a dim view; But I stand by it: on the roads he'd have been using, in the dark, mostly, he was at least some of the time gogin sufficiently fast that he'd not have been able to stop if there had been something in the road around one of the many corners; and not everything that blocks the road has lights on it.

He also called into question my night vision (admittedly not excellent but adequate) as a result of the fact that I had re-set the headlamp aim on one of the buses (after no action was forthcoming having made an official complaint about same) which was producing a shorter beam pattern on main beam than it should have been on dip. He made the point that it wasn't my job (true), that it had then had to be taken to the garage (also true) and that it didn't need adjusting in the first place (definitely false, I know what headlamp alignment is meant to look like). As a result they lost a driver.

I wrote 'em a terse letter commenting that I wasn't so irresponsible as to drive a busload of people around if I knew that my vision wasn't adequate, never got any reply, though. Man was an arse.

Reply to
Austin Shackles

You are living in a fantasy world of impracticality. In the real world of engine performance, air to air intercoolers are used by very slow moving and even stationary engines which regularly pull full power at full revs while stationary for hours on end. The intercooled discovery would pull its full power at whatever ground speed.

Huw

Reply to
Huw

Not as well as driving the thing, so you'll get less cooling and therefore less power. It's a problem that intercooled turbo sports cars have on dyno setups, you don't get the full power as you don't get enough cool air. I know various Lotus Esprit owners who've tried their cars on normal dyno setups and they don't get the power they should or indeed the exhaust cooling, which is quite serious on a car on which you can look at late at night after a fast drive and see the glow from the exhausts on the ground underneath the car.. One chap's car almost caught fire on a dyno because of the lack of cooling air flowing through the engine bay!

It works at low speeds, but not as well as at high speeds. The faster you go, the more cooling you get.

I don't know what Mr. Fearn did, but Martyn suggests he drives the road hard, which is probably what scared the owner, personally I hate being a passenger in a fast-moving car so I can sympathise!

As for objectivity, if you know the road, have driven it loads of times and know the vehicles, you'll be able to tell if it's working OK. Not to within 1-2% I know, but I was able to spot 20BHP missing on a 290BHP sports car through just driving it. As long as you can more or less rule out other factors you can judge fairly well.

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

You might get a hotter exhaust gas temperature but these things are meant to run within certain limits. A Land Rover engine will maintain high power at very slow forward speeds as the intercooler will still exchange heat with an airflow well below maximum. You actually think that full power can only be obtained if the vehicle is travelling fast or into a headwind?

It's a problem that intercooled turbo sports

My dear chap, we are not talking of tuning anywhere near the point where this would even be a minor issue on a Land Rover.

It can only cool as much as ambient air temperature will let it. The surface area is as, and in LR's case is deffinately more important than ultimate air flow although the air flow will be maintained within acceptable limits by the engine cooling fan. This is why Fearns fit a bigger intercooler. For normal use, a similar level of tuning would be quite reliably obtained with just the standard intercooler and if high speeds were the primary use then the very high airflow would certainly negate the reason for fitting a bigger intercooler.

The main job of the intercooler is to lower the air temperature of an engine at full boost in order to make it denser so that more oxygen is ingested so as to be able to efficiently burn more fuel per combustion cycle. Another major use for the intercooler is to lower combustion temperature combined with [sometimes] cooled exhaust gas recirculation [reduced oxygen] so as to reduce emissions of Nitrous Oxide to below legal limits.

Huw

Reply to
Huw

Well, an air-to-air intercooler can at best bring the air down to ambient temperature after it's been heated by the heat from the turbo and the compression of the air. The faster you go the closer you'll get to that, but of course once it's as low as you can go it won't go any lower and a larger intercooler will get there faster than the stock intercooler. So I certainly don't deny that there's a point at which more speed won't produce more power but I doubt that point will be reached by the engine fan sucking air through the intercooler vanes.

Indeed, I know, but it's the same issue, and as I said I don't believe even a large Fearn intercooler will reach peak operation while the truck is stationary.

Yep, agree 100% but what we're talking about is whether the intercooler can get the compressed air down to ambient or as close as it will go when stationary on a dyno, which I doubt very much it will.

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

so Ian Rawlings was, like...

No, I'm not concerned about a bit of hard driving to test a power upgrade - it's the obvious thing to do. What concerned me was the way he drove. The website says that "Vehicles are rolling road tested before and after the conversion work". However, when I got there he told me that the rolling road was "unavailable". After the work was complete, he invited me (but not my wife) to join him for a "test drive". He later explained that "I don't often scare husbands, but I usually scare wives" which kind of set the tone. He drove the Disco so fast and aggressively over a 10-mile moorland route that I admit he had me pretty spooked. Booting it up a long hill two feet behind a fast 205Gti was one thing - he sure demonstrated that there was a bit more power, and that would have been enough for me. But the rest of the drive was pretty awful. Blind bends at speed, overtaking a lorry on a long and narrow straight with the Disco's offside wheels in the dirt - an overtake which included a crossroads with a vehicle starting to pull out from the side road - I actually said at that point "Jeremy, that's enough". His reply was "What's the matter, we aren't even doing 70". Through a village and past a school at 40. Four-wheel slides around blind bends with high hedges either side (on my brand new BFGs!). I could go on. It's only the second time in my life I have been really frightened in a vehicle (there's a long story behind the other time). Eventually I made the point that I was satisfied with the work and I didn't need to see my Disco thrashed any further, and he slowed down a bit.

The whole thing pissed me off rather.

I expect that he thinks this will impress customers, but he came across to me as a bit of a show-off, and a dangerous show-off at that. That's what I meant when I said he would never get my car keys again. If I knew him socially, I would never get in a car with him at the wheel. It's a shame, because he's a fine engineer and the workmanship is excellent. But if I wanted another intercooler fitted to a vehicle, I would go somewhere else. The guy at Allisport seems like a nice feller.

Just my opinion, others may disagree, YMMV and all that.

Reply to
Richard Brookman

The aim is not to bring the temperature down to ambient. That would never happen practically. I can assure you that there are plenty of examples of heavy stationary engines and wheeled vehicles which are intercooled and which can be operated over sustained periods at full power while stationary. The major factor in fitting massive intercoolers into the next generation of these engines is not the maintenance or improvement of power output but purely the need to meet ever more stringent emission regulations. I maintain that the Land Rover engine can maintain sustained high power output with no detriment at lower ground speeds. There will be far more of an effect from fuel heating and expanding over a long working day which is why my TD6 has a fairly large and prominent fuel cooler fitted. To illustrate that ambient is not the aim, I should say that it is generally accepted that water to air intercoolers are efficient and commonly fitted. The liquid coolant never gets anywhere near ambient. The air temperature after the turbo we are concerned with is very hot and is still fairly hot after the intercooler. I have figures somewhere, though lord knows where.

Huw

Reply to
Huw

Ouch, no I think I'd be pretty narked about that too! Personally I hate being driven anyway even short distances.

Worst I ever had was when going to Goodwood Revival in a series 2, a friend of mine was at the wheel, no seatbelts, dressed up in 50's army gear, a wall of metal in front of me and when he canes it round a corner on a narrow road and someone coming the other way doesn't move over, he just drove all four wheels along the bank of the road at 40+ without being able to see if there were any stumps, ditches or other obstructions. He's not lived that one down yet!

Next time I'm driven I'm likely to be passenger in a 1940's Fraser-Nash wooden-framed sports car on skinny tyres, no seatbelts, weak drum brakes and no rear diff so the back skips out on almost every corner.. That'll be fun :-|

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

Do turbo diesel engines differ significantly from turbo'd petrol ones? All my experience is with petrol ones (does the difference in the amount of air flow in/out of diesel/petrol engines make the effects of an IC different?). . The intercooler simply tries to cool the interior air down towards the temperature of the exterior air. It will be more effective when the exterior air is cooler.

The exterior air is obviously going to be hotter if the car is stationary. As soon as it warms up (which it will if there is no air movement), the intercooler will become less efficient. If the car is moving then the intercooler should have a constant supply of cooler air and thus be more effective as the temperature difference between externally and internally will be greater.

I've got a saab turbo. Adding an IC meant the engine could take more boost before it got knock. My IC is not front mounted.. When I drove around with my headlight removed to give the IC some proper air flow, I could get even more boost before knock happened. I know people who have adding Front mounted intercoolers, IC misting kits to enable them to get even more boost pressure - so I was under the impression that if the intercooler stays cooler (which a moving one will more so than a stationary one - just use the coolant radiator as an example) it will work better and give you more performance.

There is a post here that mentions how an intercooler gets hot when its in use without any additional cooling -

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Reply to
Tom Woods

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