With the crankshaft centered between the frame rails, the turbo was all over the evaporator housing--not good. I had two options; one was to scrap all of my work on my existing evap housing and go with a Vintage Air type setup -or- find a different manifold. I was leaning toward the second option because the manifolds are actually priced quite reasonably. At some point I got a strange idea to try inverting the manifold to see if anything changed. Boy howdy, it sure did. Everything ended up fitting great. The best part of the whole thing--IT WAS FREE!!!
Then it was on to the intercooler. I made this cardboard silhouette to get it exactly where I wanted it. It looks extremely simple, but that thing too about an hour and fifteen minutes to make.
Now, for all that work, all that I really needed was the ends to located a couple holes because the Banks intercooler for the first gen Dodges is not flat on the engine side. I *believe* the engine side of the outer "tanks" are tapered for condenser clearance, but since I rear mounted my condenser, I wanted to "flush mount" the back of the intercooler to the core support. This required precisely locating where the "tanks" taper and that is what the vertical lines indicate.
Now that I knew where they needed to be, all I had to do was trace them out onto the surface that is not flat.
Then, all I had to do was cut them out.
Then throw an intercooler at it. This pic shows the high mount turbo configuration. It looks kind of strange from this angle, but with all the accessorial crap going on the motor (and from a different angle) it looks pretty cool up there.
This pic illustrates the way the mounting tabs are configured. I *could* cut them off and re-weld them in a better place, but since the nearest TIG welder I have access to is about 40 miles away I decided to do something different. I took the rubber isolators off of the engine side and mounted them on the front and made two small plates to cover the hole that was cut for the tabs to go through and bolted the rubber isolators to the back side of the plates. It worked slick and actually looks ok (once the grille is in, they will pretty much be hidden by the intercooler itself). Also, this pic shows the full height condenser pretty good.
That's all for today.