Intercooler Cooling – gathering parts

I ordered a Flex-a-lite 45321 heat exchanger to help with intercooler cooling on my 2008 Cadillac STS-V

Flex-a-lite heat exchanger

This is the heat exchanger that one Tuner uses alone in place of the factory intercooler heat exchanger on the STS-V  — except that they use one with a 10″ puller fan on it.  On the dyno and on the street we have plenty of air flow so I am going without the fan.

The OEM heat exchanger is  a small radiator, 24x14x.5 that is single pass with many water routes.  The Flex-a-lite has a single tube with 6 passes (the picture shown is a 4 pass version but the one ordered, 45321,  is 6) and is 10 1/2″x21″x1 1/2″

I am thinking though the best ways to test this versus the OEM config.  I am tempted to put this cooler in series with the OEM cooler, although no one is doing that so far.

What some V owners have done is replace the OEM heat exchanger with this unit, then place a Frozen Boost 101 heat exchanger in front below the front bumper, and use both heat exchangers in serial.  Other installs have just replaced the factory heat exchanger, then added a tank for extra coolant capacity.

I like the coolant tank from the LS9 install, and it would be ‘factory’, but not sure that I want to do there yet.

What do you think?   How would you setup the intercooler cooling on my V?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.