Had a bunch of work done this Winter to prep my car for the track (oil cooler, fuel tank swirl pot install, brake ducting, roll bar, harnesses, etc).

Finally thawed out enough to try and scrub in the new tires.

Drove around a little bit and there was white smoke out the rear.
I thought, maybe it's a headgasket.

But we're only boosting 15psi on a Comptech and had a 3mm InlinePro HG put in 18 months ago.

I had also noticed coolant was low in the aftercooler reservoir (it was full before).

To make a long story short, it appears that the cooling jacket in the aftercooler has developed a leak after 32k miles and 6 years. It was pumping coolant into the intake, giving the plume of white smoke out the exhaust...

Not sure if it was the freeze / thaw of multiple winters (always used antifreeze and not water), the vibration of autocross / track or if it was dropped or mishandled (unlikely).

So going to contact SOS and CT-engineering to see if I can buy the water-to-air exchanger unit without all the other stuff (air-to water exchanger). Hopefully it won't cost too much.

Thoughts? Anything like this happen to anyone else? Other ideas for replacement?

 

yikes, any pictures?! This is the first I have heard of this issue coming up.

 

honestly, I would drain the system and not go in to boost until you get it fixed, on the off chance that it dumps enough water to hydrolock your motor.

(not sure if it's even possible, but I wouldn't risk it)

 

Car is benched until I get a replacement. If I can't get a replacement in time for the next autocross event, I'll just couple the coolant hoses together and exclude it from the physical aluminum intake jacket. I've never heard of this either, but when I unclamped the unit and tried to start the car I got a big, sweet plume of smoke launched at me and over the top of the car.

I wonder if something happened to the unit while at the shop. But unless they admit to it, I'll just chalk it up to fatigue.

 

Awe man, sorry to see this. Those water/air exchangers are actually relatively generic. I have seen them made by other companies. I believe Spearco, Fluidyne, etc... make them. I bet you could pick up a Vortech one from them and use couplers to make it fit fine.

The only coupler that would matter would be the one from the Paxton SC outlet to the exchanger.

Good luck!

 

Thanks for the support! Nobody has ever heard of this kind of failure, so I pushed things one step farther. Brought the unit upstairs and filled it with water... NO LEAK.

Then I came to the realization that they routed a coolant hose to an air port.

Shop was very cool about it and I stayed as level-headed as I could. They're going to clean 'er up and get it done right.

 

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME......

 

Holy crappola...close one, ace. Well, now you know what water injection feels like done wrong. Seriously lucky not to have hydro-locked that beotch, though.

 

They had rerouted all the hoses to make way for the brake ducting. You can't see where anything originates and they're not used to S2000s.

I'm obviously not happy about the sticky mess and the coolant in the intake.

But, I am happy that:
1. I don't have to clean up the mess (if the unit was broken, that'd be the case).
2. I don't have to spend $1000 on a replacement unit.

I've been through enough teething pains that I expect stuff to be f'ked up after every major "upgrade." I usually print out s2ki.com threads and shop manual pictures to reduce the risk of these things happening.

I'll be better about triple checking everything myself in the future.

Glad I took it out on test runs before packing it on the trailer and going to an event!