Thx for the pix. The 370Z SC looks hawt and I do like the facia and skirts. It looks like they left off the salad bar. That's a good thing.

2theextreme, I don't know if a lot of those pics belong in the sc thread...

Well the ones with the stillen girls do.

RCZ running for admin. lol

Haha, yeah imagine what would happen to your account.


No I like those as much as the next guy, but there's a thread on here devoted to pictures from their open house thats all.

BTW, Fusz, thats a technicality because those girl pictures belong in any and all threads in this forum.

anyone else think that orange G was the sex? loved it. And whoever says that the Stillen 370 looks bad is a f'ing idiot. That car is just nasty.

Take your tool out of the cars tailpipe and step away from the car! NOW!

The red Z from Stillen has lots of swirls :O like mine xd

Stillen, Contact us, we have to get those ugly enkei wheels off their asap lol, but great show, wish we couldve gone.

Oh you have no idea!!! Thanks to our close relationship with NISSAN this is actually a pre-production press car, which means it has had a rough life. You should see the driver's side, stone chips EVERYWHERE!!! This was actually one of the cars that they used for a lot of their testing and media track events. The paint is pretty rough but everything else about it is nice. I'm hoping to convince Steve to let us stick it in the paint booth and respray the whole thing soon.

Do you have a lightweight 19 that you would recommend? Shoot me a PM, we're always interested in talking...

no getting off topic in here or RCZ will get mad.

So whats the status on those instructions Kyle? almost have everything wrapped up?

I've got video, but haven't uploaded it from my camera yet. Biggest thing you can hear is the nasty compressor surge on the decel. If someone wants to try and host it for me, PM me w/ an email and i'll try to send it over later tonight.

^ youtube.

:icon18:

Well he's admin/critic of the year, what he says goes. :roflpuke2:

On Another Note:
Are we going to get some more media on the SC? Did we ever get avg. intake in temps??

Now that you mention it, I don't remember seeing a blow off or bypass valve on the charge tubing. If there isn't one, that's going to be an issue.

Except of course he is correct - I for one am reading this thread to hear about the topic of this thread. But that's just me, I guess. :rolleyes:

For the recirculating valve, they are using the same Bosch valve that Vortech uses in all of their standard production kits.

There are some nice upgrades available if you are planning on higher boost levels though...

That's correct!

You can't see it because it is mounted on the bottom side of the charge pipe.

Thanks Xan and Kyle!

Yup, everything is coming along very well. The installation is complete on our customer's car and our tech. said that the installation instructions are coming along nicely.

I saw the initial instructions for the tuning process and they are even better than I imagined. It will be very simple for anyone to follow along and correctly tune their vehicle. I think you all will be very pleased with this. We need to run a few other "scenarios" on the tuning instructions to make sure we have addressed every possible situation but they should be done this week.

As we've said before we aren't going to release any specific data on this subject because there is no possible way to answer it. Intake air temperature does not have an "average." There are way too many variables such as ambient air temperature, RPM, and much much more...

What we can say is that during our testing at El Toro we were extremely pleased with what we saw. We saw temperature drops of well over 100 degrees post intercooler. And, during our heat soak testing we saw the temperature decrease rapidly once the car started moving again. As I've explained before, we put the car through a torture test to build as much heat as we could, parked it for ten minutes to let that heat soak into everything, then fired the car back up and performed a 0-140 MPH run. We were VERY pleased to see how quickly the intercooler coolant temperatures dropped as soon as we started moving again.

Glad to hear temps are no problem what so ever and the design is working great. Get excited ever time yall release more info and media. Media sells. I heard there was going to be some kind of engine cover to help make the engine bay come together a little more astheticly.

It needs something cuz it looks like a$$ now.

Wouldn't call it ***, but I agree. I think they mentioned somewhere that they have something in the works.

Looking at the customer install pictures, I think it came together very nicely. I'm satisfied with how it looks. Plus, that polished Vortech really makes a difference compared to the satin finish.

Yup, we're working on a dry carbon fiber engine cover. We wanted to finish up the customer install so we can see how it looks with the strut tower brace and everything completed. The initial design follows the runners down and forms a valley then planes out into a cover for everything else. It's small but effective.

LOL...I always look forward to the valuable/insightful input that Shumby has to offer.

I agree! The polished blower looks really nice and the best part is that it's only a few hundred dollars more. It's a dramatic difference.

well i does look likle a$$ and you guys said you were making a cover but We now see nothing. When is it coming?

I would think you could tell us what the temp was before the IC and after just so we can see if the before temps were on par with the amount of heat put out by othe FI systems. 100 degree drop is good but only if the before temps werent overly high to begin with.

For me, still being undecided which kit to get, the amount of cooling the two different ICs do is very important to my decision. I will be asking the same from the other kit too.

It is an interesting point you raise Zsteve. FWIW, I would think temps pre intercooler are similar to the other kit considering they are also running a centrifugal unit at the same boost.

No Ive asked that today and nothing yet but its only been a few. I just want to make sure which ever kit I get is cooling efficiently and that there is no heat loss due to not enough cooling from the ICs.

never messed with it, never intend to, if you want me to email the vid, i can do that, and you can upload it where ever you want. Not trying to come off as a **** or anything, i just really don't want to spend the time making an account (i'm assuming you have to) + my video is from the time they strap the car down to the end of the third pull, so its a good 7min long, not sure if there is any kind of limits to posting on you tube.

Yeah, 10 minutes. If you send it to me, I'll put it on youtube. How big is the file?

I think i have it taken care of, but i'll PM me you if not, that way we aren't cluttering up the thread any more than needed.

The discussion of air to water and air to air intercoolers is currently going on in the GTM thread but I did not want to jump in on that thread so I will post our reasoning for air to water in this thread...

Please feel free to do any amount of research on this as you like. The results will always be the same. The bottom line is, water is a more efficient cooling method than air. Water is four times more efficient at dissipating heat than air. It's thermodynamics, not some STILLEN voodoo...It just is.

This is a pretty good explanation of the benefits of air to water intercooling:

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I don't know why this says browser warning but it works fine...

One of the other benefits of the air to water intercooling is that the heat exchanger in front does not consume all of the airflow to other vital coolers such as engine oil, power steering, automatic transmission fluid, a/c condenser.

yes, there is a bit more weight in the air to water intercoolers because you do have to account for the weight of the water and additional pumps, but we're talking fractions of a percent when comparing the overall power to weight ratio of the entire vehicle.

The other thing to consider is that the majority of O.E. manufacturer's with supercharged vehicle's use air to water:

Ford
Ford GT Supercar
Lightning
Ford GT500
Ford Mustang Cobra

GM
Corvette ZR-1
Cobalt SS

Toyota
TRD supercharger for the 07+ Tundra
TRD supercharger for the older Tacomas

Aftermarket supercharger manufacturers who use air to water intercooling:

Edelbrock
Vortech
Magnuson
Whipple
Kenne Bell
Saleen
Steeda

As everyone has said...Air to air is less expensive, if it was better, wouldn't major manufacturer's use it in their supercharged applications?

In that case let me post some more merits I also posted in the other thread in here as well, as I believe they support your point. Oh and add the Bugatti Veyron to that list as well. :tup:

From my post in the other thread:

As for the air to water cooling, you do not need to add ice to match the efficiency of an air to air cooler. Water is a more efficient to draw out heat, think about it, how many air cooled engines are there today? The possibility of adding ice is just an added benefit of this type of system as by doing so you can cool the intake air below ambient, something that is impossible to do with an air to air cooler. In reality this is only useful when you’re for instance doing a drag race.

An additional benefit is that typically an air to water cooling will have a lower pressure drop compared to an air to air cooler, based on their design.
Which as a result means the your SC can be used more efficiently for engine performance.

Another benefit is that you have more freedom where you place the intercooler with and air to water cooler then you have with an air to air cooler. So you can for instance avoid putting it in front of your radiator and not have air that has been heated up from your intercooler going into your radiator and making your engine cooling less effiecient. Which in the VQ engine is a welcome benefit)

And finally there is the fact that an air to water cooler has less trouble with heat soaking. When your car is standing still, either before an autox run or just in traffic, your air to air cooler isn’t cooling. However the pump on the air to water cooling is still running and will keep the temperature spikes from such a heat soak in control.

Kyle, don't forget the Bugatti Veyron. I know its not SC, but its worth the mention.

Funny that the fastest production car in the world, one of the fastest production nurburgring lap cars and one of the most focused cars in the world use water-to-air cooling and somehow the system is inferior. (Veyron, ZR1 and Ariel Atom).

Xan, dont forget that the shorter piping also drastically improves throttle response. Also to add to your pressure drop comment. The SC will be able to run at 8psi to produce 8psi manifold pressure with the short piping and no pressure drop. If there is, lets say, a 1psi pressure drop in the IC system, then the SC will need to produce 9psi, theoretically speaking, to produce 8psi manifold pressure. I don't have to tell anyone here that the more you compress air and the harder/faster you make the sc work the more heat goes into the air to begin with and therefore the less effective the entire system becomes.

Funny also that they skipped over some search results that argued completely FOR water cooling and only picked out the ones that argue against it from websites that, Surprise!, sell air to air intercoolers. That's some seriously good research.

I was going to post something on their thread, but didn't want to deal with the arguing that was sure to come afterwards.

great information kyle and xan... nobody questions the fact that water is a greater cooling efficiency than air... however the concern is it would be nice to have more information on how the stillen kit is design to provide and maintain this cooling efficiency.... how big is ur radiator, are you installing a fan with it, location, etc etc... so if u can provide that, it would be nice... also can you think of the possible reason why nissan never used water cooling... perhaps the GTR could have used it....

Kyle you conveniently left out the fact that a good portion of those examples have no choice but to run air/water. Almost anything w/ a roots or twin screw style blower is going to be more than slightly difficult to make work w/ an air/air system. There are probably far more examples of factory forced induction cars operating w/ air/air rather than air/water.

That being said the biggest question i would have isn't what is better between air/water and air/air. I personally think they both have their places depending on the intended outcome of the build. The question would be is the system in question large enough to keep the temps under control for the vehicle/blower combination. The only way to prove or disprove this is w/ extended driving monitoring in and out air temps. Not 7 min of dyno runs on a "HOT" 72° day.

It appears that a large number of supercharged cars from the factory use air to water ICs. Why do a large number OEMs seem to prefer air to air instead for factory turbocharged cars?