Remember when it was Christmas in July? Bryan and I have since successfully boosted Landy dramatically 🙂 We were super excited to get Landy updgraded and were able to take on this job ourselves, which is only a bit sus regarding me – but I make a great assistant! This post is specifically to show our intercooler swap out – from stock to the Alive Ultimate Defender Intercooler. We used their online guide to help us, but shout out to Martyn from Alive for providing some additional tips on installation for vehicles that have air conditioning, which Landy DOES, despite that being fairly unusual in a D90. Here is my photo journal of the job! This job took us a few hours overall, including mistakes, breaks, and the demon hose. For real – at least half the time was spent getting the intercooler hoses reconnected – having air conditioning made the one really tricky to attach well.
First thing was to remove the plastic front grille which was held on by 8 screws (3 on each side, 2 on the bottom)
We had to remove the bolts holding the AC Condenser in place to allow it to move forward slightly. (Seriously, its not a lot of give, but just enough. Be super careful with this unit and all its connections! I’m aware some places fully discharge/disconnect the AC and even remove this piece, but we can’t do that in our driveway and….we didn’t need to).
Remove the “landing panel” and later, the side plates. We actually ended up removing our hood for this job vs. propping it open, and kept the hood opening stick thingie attached to the one side plate to help us more easily orient it back in 😉
After removing the inlet and outlet hoses that were connected, the old intercooler basically lifted away. This was the point where it became obvious that reconnecting these hoses was going to be a nightmare due to the tight fit and the AC unit. Not exactly an easy reach to disconnect.
Note the old intercooler clearly had something leak on it at some point. I suggested it had caught fire, but Bryan quickly corrected that notion. Anyhow – out with the old!
The new intercooler fit nicely in the space left by the old intercooler, and I love the “ALIVE” embossed on top.
Simply reconnect the intercooler hoses was the next step. We had purchased a new set of boost hoses from Alive, so also replaced the downstream hose to the turbo at the same time. Nightmare hose on drivers side due to air conditioning lines!
Then, the reverse of the above essentially to get everything back in place. We made the smart decision at the beginning to use a lot of zip loc bags to group bolts and things along the way, otherwise there would have been too many for me to know what went where. I suppose you memorize this if you do it all the time!
