TankTopMK7
Passed Driver's Ed
Finally got around to installing my Unitronic Intercooler this past weekend and thought I would do an abridged how-to/product review.
All-in-all this is a pretty straight forward job on paper, however, probably one of the biggest PITA swaps I've done to-date.
In case any of you want to attempt this on a 1.8T, here are some parts that turned this 5 hour job to an all-day event [emoji28] :
1) Unfortunately, the intercooler itself came in a bit out of shape. Top passenger condenser clip was broken off & the top connectors that the radiator clips into were slightly bent out-of-the-box.
I ended up filing down the plastic tabs on the upper radiator to make it fit. As the broken condenser tab did not give me much confidence to try and bend the upper intercooler connectors back to shape.
2) The intercooler was pretty much bolt-on up until the radiator support. Not sure if the radiator support is different vs the GTI but the IC definitely did not fit @ the bottom passenger side where the support kind of concaves inward (~2cm discrepancy). At this point I had enough of filing down plastic so I took out the rubber grommet on the bottom passenger side of the rad support and cut it in a way that the IC connector would fit snug. (The hole itself without the grommet is big enough to allow the bottom IC connectors to fit)
All that being said the connectors on the IC itself aligned well with OEM parts once I got the IC to into the housing.
The rest of it was very straight forward and shouldn't cause any pain if you have little experience accessing the radiator housing
Hope this post made at least some sense! Sorry for lack of pictures, took less and less as the day went on and frustrations grew lol. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like me to go over anything in more detail.
IC is working as it should and no complaints yet
Still waiting on my IS20 file from Uni and then we'll put it to the test [emoji6]
Sent from my SM-G935W8 using Tapatalk
All-in-all this is a pretty straight forward job on paper, however, probably one of the biggest PITA swaps I've done to-date.
In case any of you want to attempt this on a 1.8T, here are some parts that turned this 5 hour job to an all-day event [emoji28] :
1) Unfortunately, the intercooler itself came in a bit out of shape. Top passenger condenser clip was broken off & the top connectors that the radiator clips into were slightly bent out-of-the-box.
I ended up filing down the plastic tabs on the upper radiator to make it fit. As the broken condenser tab did not give me much confidence to try and bend the upper intercooler connectors back to shape.
2) The intercooler was pretty much bolt-on up until the radiator support. Not sure if the radiator support is different vs the GTI but the IC definitely did not fit @ the bottom passenger side where the support kind of concaves inward (~2cm discrepancy). At this point I had enough of filing down plastic so I took out the rubber grommet on the bottom passenger side of the rad support and cut it in a way that the IC connector would fit snug. (The hole itself without the grommet is big enough to allow the bottom IC connectors to fit)
All that being said the connectors on the IC itself aligned well with OEM parts once I got the IC to into the housing.
The rest of it was very straight forward and shouldn't cause any pain if you have little experience accessing the radiator housing
Hope this post made at least some sense! Sorry for lack of pictures, took less and less as the day went on and frustrations grew lol. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like me to go over anything in more detail.
IC is working as it should and no complaints yet
Still waiting on my IS20 file from Uni and then we'll put it to the test [emoji6]
Sent from my SM-G935W8 using Tapatalk
