Maybe someone stuck their fingers in there, but it would have been much easier to key the car. The only thing I can think of is a new car wash that I tried that uses extremely high pressure water jets. Has anyone seen this kind of damage before?

 

y u running your car through a carwash anyways....never trust one of those even those touchfree ****....i seen to many paintjobs, rims etc ruin from people running the **** through the carwash

 

go buy a radiator comb roller and ur good!, the main thing is it didnt puncture the air tubing.

 

ive used tons of car washes and ive never had rims or paint get affected at all. thats called poor paint prep LOL.

ive neve seen a spray from a car wash do that, i think youve hit a bunch of night beetles and garbage flying up or someone or something doing it.

 

I know car washes aren't the greatest for your car, but there's no other choice in the Winter. Since this happened recently, it couldn't have been beetles. I don't have any enemies, unless someone just hates my car for being a modified Japanese car, I don't know. This intercooler has been on for years, and I've never seen this kind of damage. It looks like someone pushed the fins in, but as I said, if you're going to mess up someone's car, a key would be less obvious than kneeling down and pushing in the fins. It's possible, but childish.

What is a radiator comb roller, by the way? I usually just use pliers, but that would take too long.

 

When I use to have my boost ej1 I went to the self car wash all the time. I never had any problems with it bending my IC fins at all.

 

I use to hit my intercooler all the time at the carwash to get all the bugs out of it, just dont stick the nossle up against it and the fins wont bend, pretty much common sense. If you do stick the nossle against the intercooler it WILL bend the fins. The 1st pic looks like possibly the car wash but the 2nd on looks like rocks hitting it while driving, normal damage associated with front mounts and street driving.

 

It's not the type of wash that you control the pressure yourself. You just drive in. When it hit my car door, I was amazed at how high the pressure was. I'm pretty sure this is what happened. Here's a link to the place:

http://www.touchfreecarwashing.com/index.htm

Also, I looked up radiator comb rollers, and also came across different tools that look to be easier to work with:

http://www.acsource.com/index....D=150

 

Harbor Freight in southland shopping center has a rad fin tool that's cheap and works well. I had one but someone thieved it. I used it to straighten fins on used intercoolers a bunch of times...works fine.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Sprockets &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">It's not the type of wash that you control the pressure yourself. </TD></TR></TABLE>

Makes no difference, you can control the distance between the nossle head and your intercooler, which in turn will contol the pressure that is placed on the intercooler fins.

 

Over time those little fins will bend for a number of reasons...take an hour with a little pick or something (i used an awl) and fix them. Its not that hard...just time consuming

 

Thanks for the help, I appreciate it.