[Tom Vaught]

First Off, you can have a great Brick (inter-cooler) with proper tubes feeding air to the cooling fins exposed to the vehicle airflow. But you can also screw up that inter-cooler Brick design with a poor inlet design.

Here are 3 inlet designs:

A Better Inter-cooler Design 1st pic, a good inter-cooler Design 2nd pic, and a Poor Inter-cooler Design 3rd pic.

All three, as said above may have a great core design.

If you look at the Better Inter-cooler Design (pic#1) the inlet is on the right side of the Brick.
The air comes into the inlet, some of the air hits the curved wall and some of the air packs up and stays need the bottom of the Brick.
What this does it provide nice even airflow to the full set of inter-cooler Brick "tubes" so every tube is doing the same amount of cooling.

If you look at the Good Inter-cooler Design (pic#2) the inlet can be on the right side or the left side of the Brick.
More options for plumbing here. The air comes into the Inlet tube, hits the back wall of the "Distribution Box", and then the air flows upward and downward to the set of inter-cooler Brick "tubes" so the Top portion of the tubes get a lot of nice air and the lower portion of the tubes get less air. Still not bad though.

If you look at the Not so Good Inter-cooler Design (pic#3) the inlet can be on the right side or the left side of the Brick.
The air basically comes into the inlet tube, there is really not much of a plenum on either side, so the air tries to flow thru the lower tubes and any air that can't get thru the tubes goes upward and then makes a hard left or right turn to get into the remaining inter-cooler tubes.
Easiest inter-cooler tanks to build but also the weakest as far as massive air flow capability. The Tubes might flow great the Inlet and Outlet Tanks suck.
So the inter-cooler tubes are rerally only working on that small bottom portion. The abrupt air flow direction changes are causing a lot of air turbulence.

I have added a couple of Ideal Design Inter-coolers Pics 4 and 5.
Pic #4 has very nice inlet tanks transitions. Pic #5 has the straight shot inlets BUT divides the core up into two bricks basically and makes sure that each side of the brick is doing less work and MORE EVEN work. #5 has a dual outlet but you could install a single LARGE outlet to the Bonnet for the Carb or the Throttle Body.


Food for thought.

Tom V.