Booked in for a track day with a few friends at SMSP, so I decided to finish off the new water to air intercooler setup using the Liberty RS factory core.

This required tearing the whole front end off the car. Yay.

When I did the first version of the water to air, I had just a couple of basic tools and no work shop, so a lot of this was done with a cheap materials from Bunnings. These heat exchanger up rights were made from 25×3 aluminium bare and mounted with tek screws 🙁

The front end of the car has been involved in an impact at some point an various bits are out of shape. To tidy some of this up, I fix part of the lower radiator damage and rolled the seam over with a hammer.

This provided a little more clearance for some of the changes I would be making while improving the condition.

Sadly, someone had bastardised part of the front bumper up right to fit a filthy front mount intercooler… Now the torn steel is rusting, another job to fix.

The place where the coolant pump will be mounted

The last setup had 3/4″ hoses running through the inner guards as I had no tools to do the install properly. This time however,  it will be done through running some hard pipes that will enter the engine bay from beside the battery tray.

I made the pipes out of copper tube and off the shelf bends that were just soldered together.

This worked out super easy to make and install

To keep the hard lines aligned, I CNC’d a couple of B clamps.

With the pipes run, I needed to mount the pump, so with the router working, I tasked it with the job of making a billet pump mount.

Pump fitted into the mount

And then mounted onto the chassis.

Something else I decided was that I needed a second set of rims for the car so I was not always driving on race tires. COVID has driven up the prices of the secondhand market and everyone wants a million bucks for their 20 year old flogged hektic JDM wheels, so I purchased my first set of new wheels, ever.

A nice set of Enkei RPF1 wheels in 17X8 +45.
The come packaged so pretty!

Oh so shiny.

Things going back together

The bumper has been out of shape a fair bit due to the holes being worn, so I added some washers to help clamp the bumper into the proper alignments.

I gifted myself with one last present, a brand new set of Nankang AR-1 semi slicks.

The weather has been shit all week, here is a prayer that it clears up before the track night…