I was kindly donated a new lip in the right colour by Howling Mad from MR2OC.
However, when removing the old lip I noticed my charge-cooler pre-rad (a Cinquecento one) was past it's best. Given the lip was off anyway and I had been thinking about trying a mk1 focus RS pre-rad, I thought I'd make lemonade given life gave me lemons!The RS core is very wide, so I'd need to lose my foglights.
I drilled out the driver's side light, only to see that fitting the focus unit was going to be very difficult without removing the front crash bar. So I took inspiration from JimGTS's Monster Chargecooler build and decided to fit a shiny, purpose built core:
Unlike Jim, I bought my core from AVT rather than frozen boost.
This was ultimately an issue of delivery times, so I could work over the bank holiday weekend. However I'll come back to the difference in the two cores later...Pulling the old one out was not a big problem, and you can see how the new one compares.
It's fractionally wider and slightly shorter but almost three times deeper:
Also, unlike both Jim and Toxo, I didn't remove my front bumper to fit the pre-rad.
Having squeezed the pre-rad through the gap between the lower engine rad mounts and the bumper, the core is held tightly in place at the bottom, with just a little bit of trimming of the bumper required at each end of the core:
I then fabricated some mounts for the tabs on the top of the core:
Handily I already had the driver's side fog off, so could easily hook up the pipework.
I did have to change the routing of the pipework from the passenger side to the driver's side and took the opportunity to remove the aircon receiver while I was at it. The lower hose fits straight in place, while two 90� 19mm bends perfectly line up to create an S-bend between the upper pipe and a hose placed under the fog:
There was a slight chance of the S-bend rubbing on the chassis, so I found some extra insulation and fitted it just in case.
I also had to chop some of the black foglight backing to allow the hose to fit with the foglight.I deliberately mounted the pre-rad upside down and back to front.
This means the drain plug works very nicely as a bleed valve and made bleeding the system a sinch! Having the tabs to the front rather than the back means the core could be mounted slightly lower, allowing better airflow to the upper rows. When I came to put the front lip and undertrays back on I found I'd pushed the bottom of the bumper forwards by about 2cm! So my undertrays aren't mounted as well as they previously were, but I think it'll all stay together.
I got a bit bone headed and didn't finish until about 11pm, so my first complete photos was at night:
Those with eagle eyes will spot the protective mesh on the front, which came courtesy of Chris_9011 at JAE last year! Looking at it in daylight, it looks a little more stealthy that I was expecting.
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All in all, I'm happy with my new shininess
