Nizpro Stage 2 Kit

[SCRIBR]

I think he is talking about Headsex's stage 1 cooler...

somebody dig up robin's thread about the cooler comparison

[Adam]

I can only go by what it says.

[SCRIBR]

true!

I'm used to deciphering poor descriptions of parts

[XR6Turbo22]

Complete Nizpro Stage 1 - Injectors, Valve Springs, Intercooler, Piping, Tune = 305+rwkw

[F6_Charlie]

I was at nizpro the other day and saw there new stage1 cooler/ piping kit looks good, looks really good man, and was speakin to dave about it and they are very happy with the results. So not only does it look the goods it works well also.

Charlie

[straughsberry]

I agree - looks great and will no doubt perform just as well. My only concern is the size of it. It's huge! How does this affect engine temps?

[XR6Turbo22]

I've had no issues at all, nizpro reliability!

Edited 16/01/08 10:57 PM by XR6Turbo22

[Dillz]

So much piping

Screw the stock crossover and plenum, Nizpro Stage 2 looks and million times better.

[Nizpro]

So much piping

Screw the stock crossover and plenum, Nizpro Stage 2 looks and million times better.

I would agree in a perfect world our stage two kit are a great power upgrade. Reduced plumbing, better throttle response, more at less boost giving extra reliability at the same power levels.

The only problem has been for customers that want a slow upgrade path due to fiancé. I had been ask by many people if we would manufacture a standard manifold replacement intercooler kit and I had been reluctant for a long period of time simply due to having a stage two kit available that came with an intercooler. The issue was that is we were to produce an intercooler using std manifolding it also needed to be able to be used with a stage two kit without the need for modification in order to keep the costs down for customers that wanted to upgrade from stage one to stage two later on.

Once we were able to design this the stage one cooler system was then viable. In the process we then decided to have a rethink of the stage 2 cooler at the same time as they would now be common. The full design brief is below.

Development of Nizpro’s new intercooler is now completed and the first production version will go on sale very shortly. The new cooler design is a bar and plate and although I have had reservations over this style in the past after many new core designs have been tested over the last 18 months we have now proven that our new design is the best by a long way when taking all the factors of the below list into account. The size of the new cooler is the biggest you can fit in the car without modification to the AC system and even with this restraint, the cooler is still the biggest we have seen on the market.

The new cooler had a number of design parameters we needed to meet.

Due to the increasing power levels that are now being achieve in our own Cobra kits these were the parameters that needed to be meet.

1. Higher flow characteristics at less pressure drop.

2. Better cooling effect at all boost levels

3. A cooler design that would still fit with the least amount of modification to the vehicle.

4. A cooler that would be could be used with all our Cobra kits.

5. A direct replacement cooler that was a bolt up using the standard Ford intake manifold

6. Price competitive.

7. A cooler of the highest quality that is expected of all our products.

To achieve the above we firstly needed to test all the main current intercooler on the market, these comprised of the Process West stage 1 and 2 and Plazmaman range intercoolers along with the Monza [Wog], F6 Typhoon and APS cooler.

The result after 18 months of testing the above intercoolers and comparing them with our current version lead us to what was needed to produce the best cooler in both design and flexibility on the market for the XR6 T.

For testing purposes we were very lucky due to the amount of vehicles that we have thru Nizpro that we got to see other companies coolers a number of times on a number of cars with different modifications and different outputs.

Now I understand that many people will say the only true way of conducting a genuine back to back test is to use the same car at the same power level and simple change the cooler. This may have some merit, but in lots of cases the higher end of companies intercoolers range have large flow characteristics, so their cooling efficiently changes as the flow rates are increased. How they cool at lower rates 300 ish rwkws is different to when power levels are raised. So to conduct a test on one car by simply changing the intercooler and plumbing may leave the test venerable to these factors. The other point is we were able to test a number of cars with different modifications and yet the same cooler and see if there were any difference in the cooler performance due to intake and exhaust designs. In conclusion this way of testing gave as a better real life result due to the fact that many cars have now a range of different modifications.

The main parameters we tested and measured were pressure drop across the intercoolers, temperature differential from one side to the other, temperature of the intercoolers surface at four points. Two at the top corners and two at the bottom two corners with a Ray-tec heat gun, this gave us a very good idea of the internal flow characteristics of the coolers and finally surface area along with total area.. In a car of the XR6T’s overall weight, I don’t believe the actual weight of the intercooler itself was of much importance so I did not measure this, although this would have given a further indication of intercooler performance and could be seen as importance in a pure racing application.

From the testing that we conducted back in early 2003 we already had information that strongly suggested that intercooler inlets and outlets should not be in the same position I.e. Bottom to bottom or top to top. No matter what we tried with end tank shapes we could never get a result as good as having inlets and outlets in a top to bottom scenario.

So it was with great interest when I then tested other companies products that have chosen that path with their larger coolers. In fact at the 300 rwkw power levels the problem even further high lights itself as the flow rate with coolers of this size certainly seem to simple use the bottom end of the cooler choosing to flow straight in and out of the cooler leaving a noticeable temperature differential at the top of the cooler compared the bottom. This effectively makes the cooler far smaller than it looks. Temperatures of more than 25 degs C were measured from top to bottom. As the power levels were increased this temperature differential closed but was always presant.

The end result I concluded was the bigger the cooler with the least pressure drop the worse this problem became with some very ordinary cooling being the result.

Most of the intercoolers tested showed very little pressure drop side to side and in the top end coolers especially. At the most common power levels had almost zero advantage over each other. The smaller coolers in the range at higher levels were in the range of 4 psi pressure drop but in most circumstances these coolers would normally never be used when chasing power and their cooling abilities were also very poor and in fact not much better than standard and worse than a standard F6 intercooler, they were also the cheapest. This would be the classic case of you get what you pay for.

Getting away from the intercoolers themselves the next issue was plumbing. Right from the start we decided we were going to design a package that suited a direct replacement concept along with the ability to adapt to our Cobra inlet plenum when customers decided they were going to add further upgrades latter on.

Most of us understand that the factory plumbing is some what restrictive and one pipe in particular. Due to these reasons we believe the best design was going to be a complete plumbing package. We decided that stainless steel was to be used for a number of reasons.

1. Stainless steel is poor at conducting heat. Therefore under bonnet temperature have less chance of being drawn into the piping compared to alloy piping.

2. With the use of stainless steel the wall thickness is reduced giving a larger inside diameter for the same given diameter again compared to alloy.

3. Stainless steel is easier to maintain compared to all other common intercooler piping.

4. Unlike some kits that use steel and then either powder coat or paint their piping stainless steel does not rust internally causing engine damage.

To joint the plumbing together we used quality silicon hose joiners along with silicon reducer so good transitions could be made from the intercooler outlet end tank, as this is now 70 mm to allow for future power upgrades and the plumbing is 63.5mm and finally from the stainless steel pipe to the standard Ford X-over casting which is 57mm. All hose joiners come with Stainless Steel bolt clamps. Once again these are far superior to what is supplied with the other brand kits.

The last problem was always going to be price. Unfortunely quality and great design always cost more. The only way we could overcome some of this cost was to tool up for large production runs. We decided that production runs of 100 units at a time was the best compromise.

The end result is in my opinion is the most thought about and best designed intercooler on the market that will suit customers chasing either repeatable charge temperatures for consistence power levels all the way to the biggest power engines out there without the compromise of chopping your vehicle apart.

[Dillz]

Great read guys and your dead right about the stage by stage up grading. I'd say most T owners take this path with only a small number going all out in one hit so you would be mad not to cater for this group.

The topic of intercoolers is becoming a full blown debate at the moment with most consumers (myself included) not really possessing the knowledge to know what is the best intercooler on the market and more often then not I'd say it boils down looks and reputation rather than factual performance. I'm always skeptical when I see lots of piping but if you guys have done the hard yards and it has come up good then it doesn't really matter how much piping there is or what the cooler looks like as long as it gets the job done.

Lets hope this trend catches on and everyone starts to thoroughly test their gear before swearing by it.

Dillon