I wouldn't get rid of the intercooler.

It's not small to begin with. The thing is 3" thick, nearly 3 feet long, and a foot and a half tall.

They regularly do well with 40 psi run them. Get good boots and plumbing, it'll be good.

I don't mean to keep talking you away from it, but man 1200 bucks goes a long way on these engines. That's DVs, valve train, a cam.... hell if you're real thrifty it could be an exhaust manifold too.

 

Trust me I know,haha. I can get q mishimoto for 900$ I am just trying to create a very strong platform since I'm in the ball park of hp I want and only have one or two more performance mods I'm going to do.

 

I Donno if Id waste time on dv's, you have 181 factory I believe for a 96 auto. You already have egt issues a bit and you have large tires and lowish gearing. You will just make smoke at heat. Id say maybe if you went more timing but at 17 with huge tires and what not I don't think you'd gain anything except heat. Dv really up the smoke and heat. If you plan to get the cooler get that and do your timing and see how everything works then see if you need dv's

 

Oh why yes, I'm lower to a 4in on 33in tires on 20x12 rims, timing, intercooler, see how it is and then dvs if it's a significant lower temp.

 

That should work pretty well.

 

Solid to say 500hp girl then? What should my torque be now.. has to be higher than hell with stock timing right.

 

You probably won't hit 500 hp. You may but I don't think you'll have enough air and woth that timing. From what I can tell like most other diesels you need lots of timing to make the "standard" of power for a specific set up. Let's say you have the perfect 500 hp set up but your timing isn't up there you won't get it. Plus tuning is fully manual so getting it perfect is much harder then a comp controlled truck. Where they can run 30 degrees of timing under load but at start up and idle they are near stock. We are stuck with what we choose. If you took your set up, added the cooler, tuned it with afc live and ran 26 degrees you may hit 500 wheel. Right now with a 180hp truck, 20.5 degrees of timing, 3.5 inch intercooler piping, 3.5 intake horn, crazy Carl tunnel ram, 5x.016 sacs, 191 dv, 4gsk, studs, headwork, o rings, 165 lb valve springs, HTT manifold, bd 64.5/71 special, 4 inch exhaust. K and n intake tube and afe Bhaf dry filter, electric fans, fluidamper. Full billet trans and afc live the truck made 460/900. We are hoping to hit 500 with around 25 degrees of timing. And maybe get an intercooler to help a bit. Once you get to 400hp it's much harder to make more power without a big laggy turbo or compounds. Or lots of timing

 

Wow something is off.. iv seen other 12v put down 500hp with less mods than that.. no offense to anyone but screw afc live. Think it defeats the purpose of a 12v.. you just have to deal with the extra work to always adjust the plate.. not worth the 800$ for afc live. Just my opinion but I hear it works great not trying to bring anyone down.

 

Afc live is only 350$ and it makes all the adjustments from the cab. And more fine tunable. And they likely had jacked up timing. 12valves aren't dyno queens. I could see you making 400hp but not much more. Hit the dyno and you will see.

 

When it first came out I watched a video and they wanted about 800$ they said in it, but oh well.