Flushing your intercooler

Used to be the component in Tippex solvent

Tric used to be used in fire extinguishers, those old ones with the pump handle on top.

Pretty evil stuff, I think the EU banned it a while ago, but it was fantastic at cleaning old car parts, dissolved the grease something fantastic. Has a similar effect on brain cells as well.

Alex

Heard an old timer tell a story about them being used in WW2 to remove grease stains from uniforms, when it came to putting out the fire there was none left in the extinguishers!!

Mainly depends on two parameters.

how much distance you have travelled between intercooler flushings and the condition of your turbocharger and its bearing.

Diesels have a tendency to soil the intercooler's internals with lots of black oily and sticky stuff.

Petrol powered cars (my other car is a petrol turbocharged AUDI) are less prone to such soiling but they do it too.

If the intercooler is very dirty you will DEFINATELY feel an improvement both on performance and on faster spooling up of the turbo.

Take care Pantelis

I like the sound of that! The 110 was owned by the AA before I bought it so it has been supposedly well maintained. All but the last few services were carried out by a Land Rover dealer in Inverness so if they were following the recommended schedules then the intercooler should have been flushed before.

What is a bit worrying is that the last few services were done by Halfords! I think that the AA own Halfords or t'other way round, still worrying though.

Thanks for everybodys suggestions, with a bit of luck I'll have enough tuits at the weekend to attempt this.

Halfords Autoclinics (The garages attached to the stores) were bought by the AA a long while ago. They actually do a pretty decent job most of the time, however they aren't fully tooled garages as they can't do little things like reset service interval indicators on newer cars.

Never actually had much bother with my local one with the exception of them deciding that a TD5 disco was too close to the limits for their ramp and asking me to take it elsewhere for brake work.

To be honest, I'd be more worried about it having been serviced by Macrae and Dick (that was who the Inverness dealer was, wasn't it?)

P.

I suppose in reality they couldn't employ the same level of muppets they seem to have in their stores.

It's a while since I looked at the service record I have but yes, I think that's who it was. The 110 spent its whole working life around Inverness I think.

Are they (M&D) not so good then?

Well someone in its past managed to strip the transfer box drain plug threads as I found out a couple of weeks ago. It's now held in by some PTFE tape, gakset sealant and bit of luck.

Do you get a lot of AA 110s up there then? I've never seen one on the road anywhere. Do they all have winches fitted or did I get lucky?

Oh well, they can't have been too bad as it's still going after 150,000mls.

Nowhere near Scotland, I live in Hertfordshire but I got the 110 through the Defender Centre in Stourbridge.

I would hate to think what the guys at Halfords Inverness did to it, AA 110s must be pretty much the only Land Rovers they ever see!

They don't have a good reputation, no. Overpriced non-customer orientated not particularly knowlegable etc. they are the last place I would go to get advice about anything LR related in Inverness.

Whereabouts are you if your LR was in service up here?

Regards

William MacLeod

Mines got a Warn 8274, jump lead connectors front and rear and wolf wheels.

Its got 5 seats with van sides where the bench seats would be on a CSW. There is a roller shutter comnpartment on the LHS of the rear and its all ply lined.

Oh and its got an Eberspacher too but it packed up just in time for the cold weather earlier in the year and all it does now is create a smoke screen. Must sort that for winter.

You can see pictures of how it looked when I first went to see it at:

It looks pretty much like that now except it's now all yellow and the lightbar is in my garage.

IIRC previous keeper info on the V5 is some AA dept in Birmingham which may explain how it ended up at the Defender centre.

I hope it's not rotten. There are some problems with electrolytic corrosion where the two outer rear seats bolt on, the ally panels having been holed in places. The chassis was waxolyed in the past but has now mostly come of now it been jet washed a couple of times. The rear cross member is on the to-do list for painting and waxoyling.

Hopefully with some waxoyl and paint applied in the right places it'll last a few years yet :-)

Oh dear.

Most of them are probably 110s - maybe the odd van. The AA use a lot of local garages here for recovery work. I occasionally see perhaps 3 of them sitting at the Halfords in Inverness.

I think they all have winches (superwinch(?)), do you have an anderson connector at the front for connecting jump leads as well? and the 8 spokes? The 110 station wagon configuration with 90 van sides instead of windows in the back?

Surprised they didn't sell it up here. Is it rotten, or can you just not see the rot yet? ;)

Regards

William MacLeod

On or around Wed, 21 Jul 2004 09:13:32 +0300, "Pantelis Giamarellos" enlightened us thusly:

how'd they manage that then?

AIUI, you go inlet > filter > turbo > intercooler > engine.

so where does the gunge come from? Unless the turbo's dodgy?

engine breather

On or around Thu, 22 Jul 2004 21:12:41 +0100, "Jon" enlightened us thusly:

Well, the intercooler has now been removed, flushed and refitted. All hoses were wiped out at the same time. I found a container of 1-1-1 trike in the shed that I got from I don't remember where years ago so I used that to do the flushing.

The solvent came out very dirty and left what I could see of the inside of the intercoler looking spotless, whereas before it was covered in a thick black oily film.

Net result? Absolutely no difference whatsoever!

I'm a bit disappointed as it seemed as if a lot of muck was washed out of the intercooler.

Now I've just got to get someone to get me an Allisport one for my birthday next month to make up for it.

On or around Thu, 22 Jul 2004 22:56:33 +0100, Austin Shackles enlightened us thusly:

oops. how did that escape?

On or around 23 Jul 2004 07:46:43 GMT, Simon Barr enlightened us thusly:

the word on TDis is that you don't gain a lot from biggering the intercooler unless you plan to up the boost as well; conversely, if you want to up the boost, you need to upgrade the intercooler to keep the temperatures reasonable.

The guy I spoke to on the Allisport stand at Billing reckoned upto 20% increase with a little pump tweaking and their standard intercooler which fits into the same space as the standard one.

Only problem was it costs £280. :-(

On or around 23 Jul 2004 09:01:23 GMT, Simon Barr enlightened us thusly:

There's always a catch, innit. it might be that their intercooler is more free-flowing or something, but there's a definite limit to how much pump-tweaking you can do without making it smoke, unless you also up the boost to get more oxygen in.

I did once speculate about adding O2 from a welding bottle, 'til I worked out how much you'd have to add... start looking at how much air goes into the engine: 2.5 litre requires 1.25 litres per revolution as a normally aspirated thing, presuming a not-too-restrictive inlet tract. run it at say

3000 rpm, you get 3750 litres per minute, at approx 20% oxygen in dry air, which is 750 litres per minute (if you want that in more conventional mass-flow-rate units, it's about 28 cfm)

'course, the air's not dry, so you can take off a bit for the water vapour content, though I'm damned if I know how much. But to make a useful increase in the available oxygen, you'd have to add something in the region of at least 100l/min to the inlet tract at 3000 rpm, I reckon. now I don;t know ho much in litres the big O2 bottles hold, they are, it has to be said, at about 200 bar, so they have 200 times as many litres as they appear to contain. The cylinder might have a capacity say 100 litres... in which case, you'd get 200 minutes-worth at 100l/min. which ain't very long...

granted, at lower revs you'd not need so much to get the same percentage increase.