Zuban

forget the rest, replace the water with a fluid cooled by your air con. This is what we are talking about, and remember at ambient pressure the restriction across the heat exchanger will be a lot less than when running boost and efficiency will not be the same, your standard intake with paper filters etc already provides plenty of resistance, and there are ways to negate that. The problem is you probably cant cool the fluid efficiently enough to produce a positive power benefit.

the other way round, as pressure drop across an intercooler increases as boost increases, at ambient pressure you could probably negate the intake resistance by sitting your intake in the front bumper in a way that take advantage of the ram air effect. The problem would be finding a system that would cool the intake charge enough to increase power without costing more power in terms of driving pumps etc, or negate the added weight.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-stroke-Performance-Tuning-Graham-Bell/dp/0857331256 that's the book. I did a bit more reading on the ford supercooler and its not quite what I thought it was at first, its more like a storage tank air cooled by the air con compressor that you can use when you want, a bit like a shot of nitrous in a way.

not sure tbh theres not a whole lot of facts out there about it, I do think its one of those things that in theory its a good idea, but in practice the complications and benefits just don't add up, otherwise it would be pretty common on forced induction, let alone on an NA.

Those are very good books indeed well worth a read. What wilo was asking wasn't about simply fitting an intercooler to an NA engine, but something more like a chargecooler where your pumping fluid that's below ambient temp to reduce the intake charge below ambient aswell. Ford did something called the supercooler, which used the air con to cool the fluid in a chargecooler, although that was still on a forced induction engine. Its not that silly an idea its just that in practical terms its unlikely to work well enough to be worthwhile.

There is a guy in australia who made copies of the TRD ITB manifold, they were very good, they allowed the fitting of either silver or blacktop 4a-ge itb's, or any other ones using the same mounting holes, dont know if he's still doing them or has any left though. Its not a very cost effective way of getting power but they do sound great.