CM intercooler piping kit = failure

For your reference, look here to see what the assembled kit looks like.

CM says that you need an efan for it to fit as the stock clutch fan gets in the way. And so I obtained a Maxima e-fan to do the job.

Starting off, here's the throttle body pipe. As you can see they welded two nipples, at my request, for the idle control valve. The nipples are missized and poorly placed. The idle control nipple is very close to the valve cover. Any hose attached here will probably be pinched against the valve cover.


Here's what the piping looks like overall in my 87 NA2T. As you can see, the E-fan is not fitted. This is because the piping will not fit with the Maxima e-fan. Maybe with the Taurus e-fan it will fit. Who knows. The piping goes over the radiator and behind the bumper. This kit is intended to be used with a wedge-type intercooler, and so I bought a Treadstone TRV-185 which is a spearco 221 clone. In order to fit this IC within the passenger side frame rail, we had to move the pipes as far to the right (as you're seeing it here) as possible. In order to do this, as the radiator endtank buldges at this point, we had to cut into the bumper a little to fit the pipe. While this allowed the IC to fit, the crossbar above the pipes no longer fit.


My intake attached to a snaked flexible hose. The intake pipe provided with the kit will not clear the stock motor mount. Only, perhaps, with poly motor mounts will the intake pipe clear. And then you would still need to mount the MAF and filter. I have a 9" K&N filter. This filter would have been too big to fit. The placement of the filter, right on the radiator, is less than ideal.


A very poor fitting coupler on the top piping, due to the awkward bending of the piping. We tried every possible orientation with that pipe, and this is the best we could do. Another view of my ghetto-fabulous intake snake.


After a couple of attempts at fitting where we could not re-mount the crossbar, we took the pipes out, bolted down the crossbar, and tried again. Again after messing with the pipes as much as we could, this the closest we could get. Would you expect a coupler on the larger pipe to hold 20PSI like that? Not only that, but a 1/3 of the radiator will not get an airflow from a e-fan because it won't fit under the pipes.


More awkward bending


So overall, the kit proved to be a huge disappointment. I will be sending it back and asking CM for a refund. I'll have to explore other options for IC piping that will keep the AC.

On the bright side, my turbo from cherryturbos.com bolted back in just fine. We managed to smush the stock turbo-TB pipe back on so that my car will be drivable in the meantime.