Power feels different for everybody. For some, it's the feel of freshly printed money. For others, power feels like the blinding camera flashes of paparazzi. But for many automotive enthusiasts, true power is the shove you feel in your back as you push your right foot to the floor.

The enthusiast's quest for power can be never ending (just ask the participants of TX2K) and Mishimoto has been working on an air-to-water intercooler for the 2011-2016 Ford 6.7L Powerstroke to aid in that journey. We've looked at the stock 6.7L intercooler's faults in depth and followed the development of our stronger, higher-flowing replacement; now it's time to put it to the test on the dyno.

Before we dive into the dyno testing, let's first recap what brought us here. In short, our goal for this project was to create a stronger intercooler that flowed better than stock. The first half of that goal was accomplished by casting the coolant and air end tanks, then TIG welding them to our bar-and-plate core.

It wasn't too long ago that we saw our 2011-2017 Ford Powerstroke 6.7L air-to-water intercooler on the flow bench. We talked about flow rates, and pressure drop, and learned that our intercooler flows air about 22% better than the stock cooler. Soon, we'll see how that increased flow translates into power on the Dynapacks. But first, I wanted to circle back to our original goal for this project: make the intercooler stronger.

We started this project over a year ago after finding reports of owners and shops chasing disappearing coolant. Further inspection would show that the stock intercoolers were leaking internally, and the coolant was making its way into the engine. While we didn't see a massive amount of these cases, there were enough reports for us to investigate further. After looking at our own 6.7L shop truck, we determined that we could make a stronger intercooler with a bar-and-plate core and cast end-tanks. We were also confident that the truck would make more power with our intercooler.

Intercooler design is a delicate balance of pressure and flow. Too much flow means that the charge air does not stay in the core long enough to transfer heat. Too little flow, and too much pressure, means all the work your turbo or supercharger has been doing is wasted on forcing the air through the cooler instead of into the cylinders. Heat transfer happens rapidly inside an intercooler, so it's difficult to make an intercooler core that has good flow. That doesn't mean we could use just any core in our 2011-2017 6.7L Powerstroke intercooler. Like all our products, this intercooler needed to be extensively tested before it finds its way into our customers' trucks.

In our last post, we looked at our prototype with its 3D-printed end tanks and aluminum bar core. In this post, we'll test real cores with production end tanks to get the most accurate results.

After a few weeks of casting and making small tweaks to the designs of the four end tanks, we had a design that our engineer was happy

Tucked between the battery and the radiator, buried beneath a tangle of coolant hoses, lies the heart of the Ford Powerstroke 6.7L charge air cooling system.  This chunk of aluminum, the air-to-water intercooler, is responsible for keeping your workhorse breathing easy.

A freshly cut, $500 intercooler. Not a bad Tuesday

When we looked at this project last, we outlined what makes air-to-water intercoolers different from your typical air-to-air intercooler and why they're used in heavy-duty applications.  We also took our waterjet cutter to our brand-new OEM intercooler to see what was going on beyond the bland exterior.  Once we had evaluated the stock intercooler's strong and weak points, we developed a clear way forward: develop a durable intercooler that will weather any punishment a blue-collar truck could face.

Such simple goals don't always render simple solutions. But despite the complexities of thermodynamics and heat transfer inherent to an air-to-water intercooler, Jason