Cooling, Cooling & more Cooling.
 

Hey Guys. I've got an SL55, Love it, want it to be faster, better, cooler, and am just going to see how much juice I can squeeze out of the old girl. I have a set of MBH LT headers, a race (bigger) KC, a 3.5 gallon trunk tank, HE delete (I live in Texas, HE would just be heating what the KC cools), 630 Injectors, 70mm pulley and a tune, wrap kit, and coil over conversion with some lowering. Last bit irrelevant to this discussion, but man she corners now!

I'm getting 35-40f temps on my coolant in the trunk tank, so the KC is getting the coolant right down - working really well. I am obviously really pushing the SC with the 70mm pulley, and creating a lot of heat, especially with 95-105f ambient in Austin. I feel with better cooling there is a lot more power to be had. I've seen the discussions on SLR-style IC's on top of the cylinder banks, and see the benefit, although finding one (let alone two) is like hunting for hens teeth/rocking horse ****! I also see the limitations of the stock IC and it's location.

MY QUESTIONS ARE:

Firstly, Is too much cooling of the charge possible/bad, or is it the cooler and denser the charge the better? I mean, if my coolant is 35f I physically can't get lower than that, right?

Secondly, if the answer to above is 'more the better', why couldn't you use both? I mean, exit the standard IC and into a pair of SLR-style secondary IC's where the surge tanks are? I'm sure It's an achievable fabricating job to create a box with an IC core in it with in that feeds from the IC outlet and into the Intake manifolds.

Anyone done anything like this? Sound like a good use of time, or should I just but a Whipple/Weistec kit and be done with it? I read somewhere that we lose 6-8psi through poor cooling. That's equivalent to the difference a bigger blower makes, right?

no such thing as too much cooling. there are guys that have modified SL65 top mount intercoolers for use in the SL55. I think there is a guy actually selling his setup on the AMG parts facebook page. DTK sold a top mount setup ready to go, but he recently passed in a car wreck. I think someone else is now running things, though. They can only be contacted through facebook. they gut out the stock intercooler to provide more flow as part of the switchover to top mounts. the one downside is you gotta use a filter that's basically mounted on the throttle body, which leads to a lot of supercharger whine noise. if you're into that then you'll love the top mounts

Keep in mind that coolant is also known as anti-freeze.... assuming you're running a typical water/G05 coolant mix ratio of 50/50, it'll go down to -34F before freezing.

hook up water/methanol and you'll never get hot and always feel like you are running racing gas