I installed Heatshield Products Fire Shield Sleeve p/n 210048 (1.25″ ID x 3′) on the aluminum coolant return hard pipe.

So while it’s meant primarily to protect fuel lines and such, insulation works in both directions (think of your cooler or thermos), so I’m hoping this insulation helps keep my intake air temps down when coolant temps go up. If not, I’ll have to ditch the open element air filter and go to a custom carbon fiber cold air box sooner rather than later.

I secured the insulation to the hard pipe with the supplied heat shrink at the forward end, but I did not heat shrink the the other end as packaging was too tight in the back of the engine compartment and I didn’t want to use my heat gun in confined space. Perhaps it would have looked cleaner if I’d butted the insulation right up against the silicone radiator hose and applied the heat shrink around both to seal the joint, but then it would not have been serviceable. I secured the coolant return hard pipe to my custom steel bracket with rubber isolated mount (basically a fat grommet) using a new 35mm 1.375″ rubber insulated p-clamp to fit over the new larger OD.

The whole thing looks a little kludged together but it really does give me more certainty in where and how the coolant return is routed. It’s a real PITA to use the M-tuned supplied rubber hose (or Gates #22436 hose or Dayco #E72380 hose) with internal coil spring, especially when you don’t have the stock intake manifold anymore to secure it to with zip ties. If I was to do this all over again, I’d probably weld AN fittings onto the M-tuned adapter and my radiator to completely eliminate rubber hoses and hose clamps in that section. But I’d still use the hard pipe in the middle for more precise packaging. I’d also probably change the geometry somewhat, moving it closer to the engine with tighter routing between the ITBs and the alternator. This wasn’t possible when I first designed this as the car was 400 miles away and the ITBs weren’t yet fully installed with all fuel lines, vacuum hoses, etc. so we had to make some educated guesses.

Next I have to top off the coolant, burp the system and work on capturing a composite log of my many sync loss errors so I can come up with a plan to resolve those.