I picked up a set of used FrankenTurbo F4H’s that are in need of a rebuild so I’m going to have a different center section installed.
Before refurbishing them I am going to have the turbine housings coated with the Swaintech White Lightning ceramic coating so I’ve started to disassemble the turbochargers.
The turbine housings will be sent off alone, saving a few bucks on shipping, and making it easier to coat them without the rest of the turbocharger.
The latest component to get wrapped is the upper half of the turbo inlet hard pipe, this is the section that connects to the Y-pipe coupler hose. I wrapped this section in the DEI Reflect-A-Gold tape.
At this stage most everything from the inlet snorkel to the turbocharger compressor inlet is now wrapped in some way or another. The part that isn’t wrapped is the airbox snorkel, and I’ll probably do something with it next.
I went and drove my usual route recording the intake temperatures. Rather than post up the composite chart, because it is getting very busy, I’m going to post the temperature deltas of the last two and first two recordings that I made.
The morning drive has two fewer data series than the afternoon drive, only going up to 7. Drive 1 is in the normal configuration that I had prior to doing any of the wrapping. The 2 series is the same but with the Darintake holes covered. Series 6 and 7 are with most of the wrapping in place, through to the Y-pipe in 6 and the hard pipe in 7.
The afternoon drive data with similar data series is shown below.
These results show very little difference between the ‘untreated’ inlet piping and the ‘treated’ pipes with all of the wrapping in place.
Continuing down the intake I’ve gone and wrapped up the RS4 Y-Pipe.
It’s quite the beaut now, with Duct Insulation wrapped around the entire thing.
Seeing as how the Y-pipe is an ‘air duct’ applying this material seems proper. It consists of a foam layer about 3-4 millimeters thick with a reflective coating on one side and adhesive on the other. The advertised R value for the material is R-3.
Taking the S4 out for my usual drives produced the following results in the morning:
Later in the day I repeated the procedure recording in higher ambient temperatures.
Adding these latest drives into the collection that I’ve got going yields the following charts:
Afternoon drive:
I was hopeful that this extra heat protection would produce some benefit, the Y-pipe sits directly on top of the engine and seems like a good candidate for some insulating material.
There are moments in the drive when the temperature with this latest modification is lower, around approximately 5 degrees F.
Without digging deeper into the data my initial call is that the wrapping did help some.