Thread: Fuel rail mods for intercooler?

The intercooler will lift the blower higher, and as you can tell the fuel lines hug the blower, so if the blower gets lifted, so do the fuel rails.

Common solutions are:

1. Use injector spacers
2. Buy after market fuel rails

There may be other solutions, but those are the most common that I am aware of.

BEWARE of modifying the stock fuel rail to work with an intercooler. There have been MANY engine fires because of this.

The only options that are safe in my book are as follows:

(in order of cost)

1. fuel injector spacers
2. Modified fuel rail from W Body (these are braised, and dont use any rubber hoses)
3. ZZP Fuel Logs
4. PRJ Fuel rails

If you need some pictures of what happens when you modify a fuel rail, I think I can find some pics of a friend of mines car.

webracin

money no object...PRJ rails can't be touched for fit, quality of design and materials, and followup support. But as always, true quality comes at a price.

I just installed a set of PRJ gen 3 rails. I was one of the first to get a set. They are very high quality. Support from PRJ was great. Owner himself called me. They even give you a CD with a 23 page instruction attachment full of color pictures. Like it was said engine fire = bye bye car. I had a few issues with leaks but it was my inexperience not PRJ and they were helpfull. You get what you pay for and why cut corners on fuel lines? Too much of a risk to save a few bucks. I have no regrets on mine.

been running my mod'd stock rails for about 5K miles and the actual owner of them (im just borrowing them) said he ran them for about 10-15K...no problems for either of us! (knock on wood) i have some Wbody store rails just to lazy to install because it is freaking cold

Originally Posted by webracin

BEWARE of modifying the stock fuel rail to work with an intercooler. There have been MANY engine fires because of this.

The only options that are safe in my book are as follows:

(in order of cost)

1. fuel injector spacers
2. Modified fuel rail from W Body (these are braised, and dont use any rubber hoses)
3. ZZP Fuel Logs
4. PRJ Fuel rails

If you need some pictures of what happens when you modify a fuel rail, I think I can find some pics of a friend of mines car.

webracin

X2 on this post. I agree with it 100%.

Stock fuel rails are fine and not restrictive, so there is no logical reason to change them out unless your lifting the supercharger/intake up for the installment of a IC.

~F~

Logical whats that? Know whats crazy, I changed mine for appearance only LOL. I want to show off my SC when you polish it

Originally Posted by David99GTP

Logical whats that? Know whats crazy, I changed mine for appearance only LOL. I want to show off my SC when you polish it

yea and that coming from someone who is big on cometics

I have mixed feelings on modded fuel rails but it is certainly the cheapest route. Im not too crazy about the ones on the market so I made my own setup for a customer on the last IC install I did last year and it turned out really nice. I too brazed the lines and ran everything under the throttle body so there are no lines on the front of the engine. I also mounted the pressure reg on the back side as the others are setup but its looks much cleaner this way, especially with everything being black. The big problem with this particular car was there wasnt room for lines to run over the top of the blower as it was already hitting the hood, ram air type hood, and had craddle spacers so we could shut the hood! I had to grind section of the blower and even mill down the area where the vacuum port bolts on top just for some extra clearance. What a pain but it turned out nice. We installed an older ZZP stage 1 intercooler on a good friends car back in 03 at the time I think Thrasher had the only aftermarket rails so we followed ZZPs instructions for modding the stock rail and it has never had a problem the whole time but I do agree that this method can have potential fire issues. The other problem is that bone stock cars catch on fire from the orings in the fittings be bad alone. Most of the junk yards around here have a handful of burn victims from this happening and wow does it get ugly sometimes! Something else I just thought of as I have only installed one SS intercooler.... IIRC you only have to cut one or two sections of the line and re-bend it a bit and it works fine just adding one new piece of line. If the ends were flared it would really add a good bit of security but the modded rails or billet rails really do look a lot nicer.