Plotting courses is a significant part of a life off-road. While these Broncos are designed to take on any spontaneous adventure and leave the asphalt behind, knowing your path home is a vital part of any journey, no matter what vehicle you're piloting. Like mapping these off-road excursions, the quest of packing more ponies into the 2.7L EcoBoost is a long and sometimes complex. Upgrading the intercooler piping is one of the vital legs of the journey, but Ford's layout can leave some aimlessly wandering this part of the wilderness. Not us, though. In our last post, we found our way through the jungle under the Bronco's hood, and now we're plotting the course.
Our first step to devising our new path was through the creation of our virtual workspace with the help of our Faro Design ScanArm and modeling software. These tools combined give our engineer, Dan, a scale replica of the Bronco's engine bay to generate our new design. With such tight tolerances throughout the now larger diameter
The Bronco is built for the wilderness. Just a glance at this towering machine makes that apparent. Even the trims not dressed to the nines in the sprawling catalog of off-roading accouterments still have the natural instinct to scamper through most terrains thanks to the well-sorted AWD system and 2.7L powerplant. While this twin-turbo V6 is no slouch, we enthusiasts still have the inherent need to add even more horses to the pack. Cranking up the boost through tunes and turbos is the simplest solution, but other components must be addressed to handle this added power first.
Ford's priority for function becomes truly apparent once you lift the hood on your 2.7L powered Bronco. The intricate maze of tubes and pipes on full display gives us flashbacks to that classic Windows screensaver. Each pipe and component snakes perfectly around each other, creating organized chaos, but all working together in harmony together. This layout, however, does take its toll on the 2.7L's intercooler piping
