driveability

I'm becoming fixated with my air charge temps ! Can't sleep ! LOL

I am going to build an A/C based heat exchanger system. Not water chilled, freon running through the two H/Es. I've been drawing up plans for weeks. Trying my best to add quality constant cold air to my engine. I know in the past when the bug hits there's no turning back. Last time this happened was with my V8 914. I wanted power steering so I entered the garage and didn't quit until it was completed. I used a Jetta rack and built a sub-frame attached to the existing suspension.fabbed up tie rods using the existing 930 units I had on the car. Made a new steering wheel linkage from scratch and built the pressure lines with my MIG welder. Didn't want to use a pulley driven pump so I tested a few electric units and decided on the Toyota MR2 unit. This took about 2 months ( I work at a snail's Pace) and it worked perfect. Not too much assist or too little (all luck there)
I may disappear for a time...... Wish me luck !

shardul

iTrader: (1)

i will be following this thread. keep us posted with pics.

WHTEVO

Good luck! Very interested to see how this works out since i have seen a custom car in the past with a setup like that which worked extremely well.

Aaron

driveability

I am looking to buy a set of heat exchangers off a V12 engine like the one in my 05 CL65. I need to have a set to work with, and just find out what the burst pressure is in the core sections. I think I can harden the outer shell quite easily. Now I am trying to convert my Lincoln 180 HD to weld aluminum. Since I'm not using my radiator heat exchanger with this project I was going to use the area where the second radiator sits. I was toying with building a two row condenser to be mounted there. I guess I could move the condenser to under the trunk but would have to remove some tire well sheet metal to make room. That would be better because the condenser could be one row and much larger. My friend Ted has some good ideas of how to mount the compressor and hes talking about how to bleed off the high side pressure away from the heat exchangers when the system re-balances. This way we could keep the higher pressures away from the H/Es.

greekviking

What you're trying to do has been done by KillerChiller.
Great guys with a great product line.

driveability

Killer Chiller is NOT the same system, its cooled water. My system (one that only exists in my head now) won't use water at all just FREON. I am installing 2 AC evaporators in place of the water to air heat exchangers.

driveability

Having considered the use of freon so close to the intake and the fire hazard I'm going back to using water. I'm in the process of building a large unit based on the Killer Chiller design. It will be at least 3 times the size of the KC units. Still going to install a second compressor etc.

driveability

I am going to use this evaporator.

greekviking

MASSIVE !!!
I like your idea very much.
So the turbos are going to blow the hot air through this evaporator which will run freon at 35' F .
Now you have to weld up some fancy enclosure and sandwich this inbetween the turbo and throttle body.
The only problem could be lack of space in the engine bay....

MB-CLS500

Hi I was wondering if these (m275) intercoolers use same coolant that engine uses. I mean water that circulates in intercoolers comes through engine? Or intercoolers have their own coolant circulation circuit

Flight Test

Don't forget that that A/C compressor turns off at full throttle to protect itself from comming apart. The Killer chiller uses a quantity of cold water to continue the cooling effect while the AC compressor is off at WOT.

MB-CLS500

Hi did you finished that intercooler system using freon instead of water I was wondering if this was doable when i bought my cl600

ZephTheChef

A direct refrigerated setup is simply not do-able without substantial upgrades to the cooling system. 600hp worth of air flow @ 300 degree F outlet temps is going to require around 240,000 btu/hr to cool to just 100 degrees F. Let alone to get down to freezing temps. These A/C systems might put out 1/5th of that at max output. The compressor isn't active under WOT anyway, so you'd have to wire around that. A direct exchange system like this wouldn't even cool your air temps down near what the stock setup does.

It is almost do-able with a two-stage setup like I am rigging up (leave your ambient cooling loop in place to take most of the thermal load), but even in that case I would want to use a water reservoir.

The advantage of using it to chill a water reservoir is that you can "store" the charge heat in the water and then dissipate/chill it back off over a longer time period when you're cruising or off-boost. It allows you to put the lower capacity of your A/C system to use by installing a large thermal mass in which to buffer the rate at which the temperature change occurs. Allowing you to have a much longer burst of speed and still keep the temps down vs just dumping that thermal load mostly into the mass of the intercooler itself, requiring instantaneous dissipation if you want more than say a half second of cooling.

Additionally, you won't get very good chiller performance with the cabin A/C on. You need to install valving to shut it off completely if you hope to provide much chilling for your intake, and likewise to shut off your chiller if you want to cruise in comfort.

Dr Matt

I spent the last couple weekends doing some repairs and mods to my car, one of which was the killer chiller. The a/c system should be charged tomorrow morning so I'll have results soon. I can tell you, the stock system was designed around packaging concerns more than for efficiency. The way the metal piping for the system runs back to front and front to back tucked in so close to the engine is a terrible idea.

My drive to work is 5 miles. I typically spend 5-10 seconds in boost to get there. My IAT's when I park are normally 108-113* when I shut off the car. The shop I took my car to to charge my a/c is farther away, has a lot more stops, but the exact same amount of highway. Since I bypassed everything except the stock heat exchangers, I had no cooling whatsoever on my drive to that shop this morning so I never got into boost. When I shut off my car my IAT was 106*. I am optomistic to say the least that the killer chiller with NO TANK TO STORE COOLANT will work at least as good as the stock system with short bursts of boost.

Time will tell, but the stock plumbing is terrible for cooling the charge. I'm sure driving around, shutting off and starting the car would have been worse the aid drove it today because there was no way to dissipate accumulated heat, but I think the killer chiller will out perform the stock setup for around town and drag racing the 1/4 mile. If I'm wrong, I'll show you once I do some driving with it.

ZephTheChef

Are you running the killer chiller in addition to your stock heat exchanger, or have you replaced it entirely? IATs are going to have more to do with system capacity and duty cycle (time spent on-boost vs time spent cruising/cooling) than anything else. I mean regardless of whether you are dissipating the heat in the heat exchanger or the A/C condenser you have roughly the same airflow available for cooling. With the A/C condenser, you are leveraging the higher compressor discharge temperatures to gain a larger temperature differential across the heat exchanger, so theoretically it dramatically increases the efficiency of the front mount heat exchanger vs a direct water to air exchange. The problem is that your compressor capacity is extremely limited compared to your turbos' ability to generate heat.

I'm not just doing guesswork here, I've had a homemade refrigerated setup on my other car for several years and have tried numerous configurations. It works absolutely great if you don't spend very much time in boost. The more water capacity the system has, the longer of a pull you can do before temps start rising, but also the longer it takes to chill back off.

The math on system capacity is actually pretty simple if you make a few assumptions. Let's do a 1/4 mile run for example. Basically the amount of energy it takes to cool air depends a lot on the humidity, so I usually just use 1/3 BTU per lb of air per degree F which is kind of an in-between/average humidity assumption, probably a little on the pessimistic side. If you're making 600hp, that's roughly 60 lb/min of airflow and if you're running say 17psi boost to make that, your compressor discharge temps are going to be around 300 degrees F. If the baseline is that you want to cool/keep your air 100 degrees F then that's 200 degrees of temperature change, let's figure 12 seconds worth for a 1/4 mile, so that's on 12 lbs of air. .33 BTU * 12 lbs air * 200 degrees F = 792 BTUs that are going to need to be absorbed by your intercooler system during a 1/4 mile run. 1 BTU is the amount required to heat 1 pound of water 1 degree F. Water is 8 lbs a gallon. Let's say your system holds 1.5 gallons. 792 BTUs divided by 12 lbs is 66 degrees F of temperature rise during that run. So in order to still be at 100 degrees by the end of the run (ignoring intercooler efficiency for the sake of this calculation) you would need to start with water temps of 34 degrees F, or start with a larger water capacity. Your average automotive A/C compressor is probably around 36,000BTU/hr capacity...there just isn't enough capacity in a stock system even under ideal max performance conditions. And a large portion of that will be going to cabin cooling unless you physically shut off the cabin evaporator cores with a valve. The chiller might make sense for very short bursts of a second or two on the street with ample recovery time, but on a prolonged WOT run you aren't going to maintain temps very long.

My personal experience with my car has been that although I can certainly get the temps down below zero if I let the thing sit and idle for 15 minutes (I have a 10-gallon reservoir), it takes only a few minutes of relatively normal driving (short acceleration bursts like onto the highway, etc) and the water will be more or less ambient. I calculated my actual driving around town duty cycle as something like 3%. And that's with my cabin evaporator closed off.

The much better solution for drag racing is ice. Ice will absorb 144 btu/lb during melting before your temperature moves even a single degree. In our same example 1/4 mile, it would take 1072 BTUs to keep those temps at 32 degrees. That would only take 7.4 lbs of ice in a reservoir per pass to keep your air at 32 if you start with your coolant temps at 32 vs starting at 32 and ending at 100. Keep in mind, this advice is coming from a guy who has spent thousands of dollars and tried about 4 different configurations of chillers on a car with a much more powerful A/C system (or at least significantly more frontal area/condenser size) and lower power output (less BTU requirement to chill my air under boost). Making your own ice water is a cool concept, but in real life I don't think it's very practical.

To give you an idea of the extremes you have to go to in order to actually make it work, the current round of mods on my other car is going to utilize a ridiculously oversized truck radiator, two A/C compressors, both overdriven 25% from stock, and a total of 3 A/C condensers up front...one air/water first stage utilizing a separate loop off the radiator that both compressor outlets will go through, and then split to two traditional air/air condensers in parallel (reverse flow to each other). I am also employing a very large front mount air/air intercooler as a first-stage on the charge air side to absorb hopefully around 75% of the charge heat under load to yield a much better duty cycle on the chiller. A direct air/air exchanger is much more efficient at instantaneous cooling than the chiller setup (which will then do its work off-boost when the air/air isn't really doing anything/needed). I expect this setup to work very well. But really, I wouldn't expect it to if I wasn't able to put most of the heat into that air/air intercooler first. The math on it just doesn't work even with 2.5x the stock cooling capacity for anywhere near a reasonable duty cycle if you're sinking all of the system heat into it.

Welwynnick

Interesting analysis. I did something similar, but from a slightly more analytical perspective in this thread,
https://mbworld.org/forums/m275-v12-...ion-pumps.html

and came to much the same conclusion:

How much heat does a charge cooler have to remove from the intake air:
https://mbworld.org/forums/m275-v12-...ml#post5621731

How much heat can the coolant take away:
https://mbworld.org/forums/m275-v12-...ml#post5621731

How much extra thermal load when you tune (a lot!):
https://mbworld.org/forums/m275-v12-...ml#post5637319

Discussion of Killer Chiller:
https://mbworld.org/forums/m275-v12-...ml#post5641903

I ended up with an engine radiator and an engine pump, run by a customized controller. And a header tank.

Nick

ZephTheChef

Nick,

I have huge respect for your experimentation on the intercooling systems on these cars, and your thread on it is by far the most valuable information I have found on these forums. But I do disagree on the maths. Lol. I only really started digging into it when my reservoir temps were increasing much faster/higher than expected driving around. The chilling performance was actually better than I had originally predicted sitting around at idle with the fans going full tilt...but the heat the air charge was putting back into the water was larger as well.

One thing I do wonder about, and I don't recall if you've used this assumption for math anywhere else (like for figuring heat exchanger dissipation sizing maybe?), is your radiator dissipation figure at 400kw. Radiator capacity doesn't usually match peak engine output, it matches needs at much lower loads, which is most likely less than 10% of that. It can store a lot of heat in the 2-3 gallons of coolant/water from a quick WOT burst where you're putting that 400kw into the system and then dissipate it over a much larger time period just like the intercooling system, but I don't think it's capable of dissipating anywhere near that much energy steady state. It has a lot of things going for it that help prevent runaway overheating once you get on the throttle (efficiency increases as temp increases...efficiency increases as speed increases due to airflow, water pump speed increses, etc) , but I would be surprised if it actually dissipated more than 1/4 the heat the engine was making at WOT during the same time period. I've done quite a bit of reading on the subject when trying to size a replacement radiator for my other car...it's surprisingly difficult to find specific information on BTU dissipation capacity of X sized heat exchanger (probably because BTU capacity changes SOOOO much based on temperature differential and airflow), so I could be wrong.

It's interesting that you calculated about 1/4 the cooling requirement that I did at peak load. I don't really want to dig into all the unit conversions right now to see what might have happened, but I think I can explain the bulk of it without doing much head scratching.

As far as the calculated air cooling need, there are just a couple things that represent most of the difference between our calculations. Firstly, compressor efficiency. Your average turbo compressor is going to be in the 65% efficiency range at peak output like that. Maybe low 70s for a really efficient one...you calculated just the temp rise from perfect compression and these are very, VERY far from that. Along the same lines, I doubt whether these turbos being overspun on a tune are anywhere near the Goldilocks zone for efficiency, so it may be even worse than that. Secondly, you used the heat capacity of dry air. Air is seldom 0% humidity in real life, and the specific heat varies wildly with moisture content. I use around a 32% multiplier to account for atmospheric humidity when doing the cooling math (.33 btu/degree/lb vs .25 or so for dry air).

Water takes a lot of energy to change temperature, which is precisely why it is used in our intercooler systems...but it also works against you when you have high atmospheric heat and humidity. That may not be as much of an issue for you in the UK, but in the summer here, it may take twice as much energy to cool the same air on a hot, humid day vs a cool dry day. The math to figure out exactly how much more is very complicated and changes a lot with temp and % humidity so I don't bother with getting too exact and have just settled on the .33 btu/lb figure for design math since it's a bit on the pessimistic side but not nearly worst-case. You used 80F degree ambient, I used 100F (the same as what I was calculating the cooling requirement to get back to), so there's some difference there as well for sure. I'm going to assume your heat calculations on the water temp rise are the same as mine since you said at one point it's a quarter of the air temp reduction for the same mass (which matches the .25 btu/lb for the dry air figure that I mentioned earlier).

Basically what it comes down to is I think the real energy dissipation requirements are significantly higher (2-8x really, depending on humidity) than what you calculate primarily due to the compressor efficiency penalty as well as the possibility of humidity in the ambient air.

Realistically, there is NO WAY any front mounted heat exchanger is going to keep up with the engine's cooling demands at WOT. That's what the heat capacity of the water is for, and why you need enough of it to allow it to handle as long of a WOT run as you're planning on at acceptable temperature rise and then dissipate it over a much longer cruising period.

Obviously a larger heat exchanger and pump is going to serve you a little better, but not nearly as much as you calculate because a heat exchanger's capacity is based more on temperature difference between the cooling medium and the fluid you are cooling...much more so than actual size. A bigger exchanger that is controlling the heat better is going to be closer to ambient temp, which makes it less and less efficient...so it's kind of like chasing your tail. That's where the A/C system really becomes an advantage. By dumping that heat into the refrigerant and then compressing it again, you end up with much higher temperatures relative to ambient at your front mount heat exchanger (condenser). To the extent that you may have 200+ degree F and 80 degree ambient temps, which may well give you literally 6x the BTU dissipation capacity for the same surface area as a direct exchanger with only a 20 degree F difference between the coolant and the air. But like I said before the issue is that the compressor can't really keep up with the demands of the system.

If you're just looking to have 80-100 degree F intake temps, there's nothing wrong with a killer chiller type setup, and it will probably do alright if you're just looking for an occasional short blast of throttle...but I think it is useful to know the limitations of the system so you can plan/drive accordingly. You absolutely can dissipate more BTUs with your A/C condenser than you can a front mount heat exchanger due to the much higher temperature differential present, and it should outperform a stock heat exchanger significantly...but you can only utilize it to the extent that your compressor can pump refrigerant.

ZephTheChef

On the S600 I do plan on running a refrigerated setup as well, so by no means do I consider it a waste. But due to the limitations of the stock A/C system, I will be attempting to dump most of the heat into basically a stock setup ambient loop with a second set of intercoolers and running a separate refrigerated loop as a second stage on the stock intercoolers. Air/air would be more suited to the first stage due to the way the two methods complement each other (the bulk of the A/C setup's work is done off-throttle and the bulk of an air/air is done instantaneously on-demand so they aren't fighting for BTUs as much). But there just plain isn't enough real-estate for air/air intercooler(s) up front.

Dr Matt

Great info guys.

My trial setup is just using the Killer Chiller and I am no longer running anything through the stock H/E. I do have a valve to shut off the cabin A/C, but on the first drive I did not switch that on. When I drove the car through town without it being heat soaked my IAT's certainly stayed cooler than it ever did with the stock H/E only. However, I parked the thoroughly warmed car in the sun for about an hour, then started it up and as expected IAT's were over 180*. Slow driving through a parking garage, then neighborhood roads, followed by multiple stops long stoplights, and some 45mph cruising got the temps below 100* periodically, but at idle they climbed due to lack of airflow. My factory setup would not have gotten temps down that far without some highway time and the A/C off. Initial impression is the K/C is maybe a little better than the stock setup, but I'm not sure just how much. I'll need some more seat time to find out for sure.

I may put the stock H/E back in the loop, but without using the stock metal piping that runs along the cylinder heads back to front, then front to back. I suspect that kills a lot of the systems efficiency. I'm really trying to avoid the trunk tank and ice setup. Been there, done that.

ZephTheChef

I would wager that the condenser is the first weak link in these A/C systems...simply due to the lack of frontal area in these cars. Heck, it was in my giant boat of a car that I have my chiller setup in, so I'm sure it is in these. You may want to consider rigging up a misting or water spray system to help chilling performance. It really improved my setup sitting idle/low-speed operation. It might also be helpful to figure out if there's a way to force the fan to go to high, whether by adding new wiring to trigger it manually, or tricking the computer to turn it on with a switched false temp signal or something.

I looked into it real quick. I guess it's got some sort of integrated fan control module that receives a signal from the PCM telling it how fast to spin based on two things: A/C high side pressure, and engine coolant temp. So it already adjusts based on A/C needs. However, it also says the PCM has the ability to shut off the A/C compressor if high side pressures get out of range. So if the fan/condenser aren't keeping up with the compressor the computer will cycle it. So misting the condenser could definitely help. That latent heat of vaporization is real magic.

Welwynnick

I'm afraid my typing can't compete, but there are a few points to reply:
Yes, absolutely. Unlike heavy trucks, fast cars don't spend long going slowly, so the radiator doesn't have to be proportional to engine power. The V12TT uses the same 641x469x40mm radiator as the S430 with half the power. Big trucks with comparable power have HUGE radiators, because they DO have to dissipate full power at low speed for a long time. Car cooling seems to be more difficult to analyse, and it seems to be empirically rather than analytically. Otherwise we'd never get away with such small radiators.
Yes, I didn't take that into account, and the heat has to go somewhere. I knew that compressor temperatures were higher than I calculated, but I didn't put any numbers to it. 70% seems to be a good figure, for peak torque operation, but max dissipation will be nearer max power, with lower efficiency. 65% efficiency means the charge air temp rise will be about 50% higher than my figures, so about 30kW instead of 20kW for a stock car. Not a huge amount of power, but not a lot of temperature difference to dissipate it, unlike the engine rad.
I don't agree with that, because the air temperature calculation is only an intermediate to getting the thermal power dissipation. In a way, it doesn't matter what the specific heat capacity is - only the magnitude of the thermal power. Yes, humid air has higher capacity, but then the temp rise will be lower, so the thermal power remains the same. In any case, water vapour has low density, and only makes a few percent difference. I couldn't find any evidence otherwise.
Yes and no. FMIC's for example have no choice but to keep up with real-time cooling demands, as they're not buffered by the water. What will happen is the cooler heats up, and becomes less effective, so the IAT's will rise. That's what happens in practice. It happens with water cooling as well, but there's a storage or lag in the response because of the mass of the water.

This raises the bigger question of whether this reasoning justifies having a bigger IC than HE, because the latter has more time to dissipate the heat. The IC has to transfer the heat real time, while the HE can take advantage of the storage. FMIC's are usually configured with about 50/50 distribution of core volume between charge and ambient air, which kind of makes sense. Of course bigger is better, but IC's tend to have about half the core volume of an air cooler, and so does the HE, so they add up to about the same total core volume.

However - should the IC really be bigger then the HE when you take the water into account? I don't know the answer to that. In practice, I think you make both as big as you can.
Yes, more temp difference will dissipate more heat, but you have to take into account the mass flow of the coolant, which is much lower with AC. I don't have the figures, but I don't need them. Car AC's provide a few kW of cooling in exchange for a few kW of pump power, while the IC needs a few tens of kW of cooling in exchange for a few tens or possible hundreds of watts of pumping power. Ten times the cooling for a tenth of the power? Sounds like a good deal to me.

Ultimately, the AC system can only cool what the pump can pump, and that's not very much. Refrigeration systems typically give you about 2x gain. In other words, a 1kW compressor will pump about 2kW of heat. Compare that with (worst case), 200W pumping for 20kW heat for IC systems, or 200W for 200kW for engine cooling, where the temp difference is high.

All the best,

Nick

ZephTheChef

That's very interesting. Oddly enough, I had considered that concept in reverse (that cooling from pre-turbo water/meth then reduced intercooler efficiency and makes them work harder to condense the water back out for no or at least less net cooling than calculated) but somehow it had escaped me with normal atmospheric humidity. But thinking about it just a little, it's obvious that you are correct. Atmospheric moisture is going to act as thermal mass in both calculations (the rise during compression, as well as the cooling process) so you're probably correct and I should be using the .24 btu/lb figure. I found the other math/figures on it when doing research on A/C systems and it's used extensively in residential/commercial cooling of buildings, where the humidity does matter because it isn't the exact same air being heated by the condenser as cooled by the evaporator, whereas in the case of our intake tracts, it is. Thanks for that, my perspective continues to evolve.

The heat transfer into the water is something like 20x more efficient a process than the transfer in air. I don't remember the exact figure...17x or 24x or something. Point of the story is, a liquid to air heat exchanger can be tiny compared to an air/air and have the same heat removal capacity. The only way to know whether you'd really need or benefit from a bigger intercooler core. Realistically, in doing so I think you're just chasing a few % efficiency in the core itself to get the air outlet temps just a little bit closer to the water temps. Which then doesn't do you any good if your system capacity or heat exchanger up front aren't up to the task as well, so everything is tied together and balanced.

That's exactly why I poo-poo'd the concept in my first post. You can leverage the higher temps of the A/C compressor outlet to get a higher capacity out of the exchanger up front, but at a huge power cost and also only to the extent that the compressor can pump freon. You're absolutely right, it's a lot less power to pump water at 5-20psi than it is to pump freon at several hundred. It's a good concept, but the system needs to be beefed up substantially for it to be effective, and I don't see how it could ever be realtime on one of these cars like the original post in this thread was suggesting...it HAS to have a large water reservoir to allow that work to be performed/stored over a long time period.

By the way, I'm having to replace my radiator due to the all-too-common crack at the driver's side hose attachment (after replacing my belts and pulleys, which I pulled that hose and the fan to do). The core is fine, so what do you think about making some custom slim aluminum end tanks and using my old radiator as a big heat exchanger for the intercooling system? I do not have distronic. Do you think it would fit?

Welwynnick

I had exactly the same header tank crack. On these cars its difficult to see, and replacing the rad is strangely awkward.

When you do - check that the hose connector fits the radiator port BEFORE you fit the radiator. Can you guess what happened to me?

Custom end-tanks? That's an interesting idea. It did cross my mind to use a second W220 engine radiator, but the overall width is rather great. All along I've been thinking terms of 560 - 600m core width, and I'd have been quite happy if I'd fitted the 532mm W124 radiator.

Slim tanks on a W220 rad may help, but the width of the radiator would push the tanks far outwards, and into the tapering space between the radiator and the impact beam. That gap gets narrower the further you move outwards. You'd also have to make sure you don't block the engine intakes, and will you be able to clear the PAS cooling lines.

You'd certainly have to move the ABC lines and cooler, but without Distronic I think you'd be OK. I think it would be a challenge. Good luck.

Nick

ZephTheChef

Are you saying the new radiator had a different size port? I ordered a new factory hose because I didn't want to take any chances so I could test fit it on the new radiator. However, I think I am going to send this radiator back and get a genuine one. I tried one of the cheaper replacements and it doesn't actually have threaded inserts in the tanks...just blank bosses/holes in the plastic. I'm not about to go through the trouble of finishing the install and not being able to bolt anything back up to it.

Did you have to pull the bumper cover or no? I've gotten everything but the bolt that attaches the heat exchanger on the driver's side without pulling the bumper, but I don't know if I'll get that sucker or not. Very tricky.

I was thinking it would have to protrude very slightly into the intake scoops, which I would be ok with but no idea what clearance is like elsewhere. If I was using a stock radiator, I already have mounting points for the other coolers, so that would be handy. Just don't know if it would clear the hood latch and/or crash bar. I might have to take a look at that before I put everything back together and see. I can't do pretty aluminum welds, but I can make them airtight, lol...and 1/8" aluminum bar is easy enough to come by. It would be good welding practice even if I don't end up using it, lol.

Welwynnick

Yes. I wrote this procedure for doing the radiator last year (my first replacement radiator had 42mm hose fittings!"£$%^&?):

Before doing anything, inspect the new radiator and make sure it’s to spec; this is really important.
Make sure the outside diameter of the hose receptacle is 41.0 to 41.5 mm.
Make sure you have threaded receptacles for the fan cowl, IC HE, IC pump, AC HE and AC pipe fittings.
When you remove the old radiator, some of those fittings may be rusted up – test them first, and figure out what you’re going to do.
Establish whether your header tank fills to the RH header tank, or the bottom hose.
The new radiator may have a ¾” filler hose receptacle that may need to be blocked off – which can make fitting more difficult.
There are rubber & plastic mouldings all around the radiator to control airflow, and they take time to remove & refit.

Get yourself some good lights, and get to work….

Lift the front end of the car onto stands and remove the top and bottom covers.
Loosen the header tank cap and drain the cooling system. This takes a while.
Remove the thermostat/top hose housing and disconnect all the hoses (expect spills).
Disconnect the electric fan.
Remove the small clips that hold the top & bottom of the fan cowl to the radiator flange.
Unscrew the secondary radiator pipe from the bottom of the cowl, noting where the screws went.
Undo the two transmission oil cooler pipes, catch a bit of oil, and cover the pipe ends.
Undo the two nuts at the top corners of the fan cowl.
Pull the fan assy up an inch, tilt it back and slowly rotate / pull it out upwards (pushing the IC pipes out of the way).
From underneath, undo the IC pump and its bracket from the radiator.
Still underneath, remove the bolt that holds the aircon pipes bracket to the radiator.
Unbolt the top L&R of the aircon condenser from the radiator.
Unbolt the IC heat exchanger from the radiator, and support it.
Undo the plastic clamps that hold the top of the radiator.
Push the top of the radiator back and remove the bleed pipe.
Remove the plastic brackets that are clipped half-way up each side of the radiator (awkward)
Lift the radiator out.

Lifting the radiator out is unsurprisingly more difficult than it sounds, as it’s a tight fit width-wise between the chassis rails. The problem is that there are three steering and suspension oil coolant pipes that squeeze through an aperture alongside the radiator. The aperture is sealed-up with a triangular rubber grommet, which best pulled forwards out of the way of the radiator. The three pipes then need to be manipulated so they’re flat against the chassis rail, and give as much room for the radiator as possible.

Now is the time to replace the anti-freeze, the thermostat, the thermostat housing o-ring, the hose connector o-rings, and the hoses and aux drive belt if you feel like it.

Refitting is the reverse of removal, but:
Check that the top hose assy fits both radiator receptacles before fitting the radiator (ask me why).
Tape sheets of corrugated card to the front and rear facesof the new radiator, otherwise you’ll make a horrible mess during fitting.
Make sure the secondary radiator pipe doesn’t foul the fan, as the cowl doesn’t protect it.
Make sure the aircon condenser is in about the right position before you push the new radiator forwards into position.
Make sure all the small hoses and cables are tied away from the moving parts, like the ancillaries and the aux belt.
The cooling system bleeds itself, but only when the engine is fully warmed-up, and you need patience.

If you’re prepared, it should take about a day.

Nick