After a solid 3-day thrash the car is back up and running with the 3.8 Whipple. A friend of mine flew across the country to help and we put the blower on along with a whole laundry list of parts I had stockpiled. A few things to note with the 3.8, you will have to notch the metal crossbar that holds the wiper motor and pcm bracket into place along with the cowl in the same area behind the blower if you have the race intercooler as it adds an extra inch of height. The other way to do it would be to space the cradle down to make up the room. This setup will NOT fit under a stock hood which I already knew from measuring it out, so hopefully the Anderson Composites hood gets here soon.
A few things to note when going from the Whipple 4.5 to the 3.8 or likely even the 3.0. If your car has hydraulic power steering you will need to swap back to a stock power steering reservoir, also the coolant tubes for the heater core used in the Whipple 4.5 should be swapped back to stock as the drivers side tube from the 4.5 kit will interfere with the throttle body, at least if you have one of the 130mm units. That can be seen in the picture above my post. What we ended up doing was snaking the coolant hose under the blower like the stock hellcat tube would be and tapped the hole in the water pump for an NPT fitting, which worked perfectly. Other than that the install was fairly straightforward.
While we were at it we installed my AAD rear drag pak kit, TCE 15 inch conversion, GForce Outlaw axles, Per4mance development DIRS diff brace and race brace, rear seat delete and I'm sure there is some other stuff I'm forgetting. I test fit the rear 15 inch billet specialties wheels and realized I need longer studs which totally slipped my mind and would have been a lot nicer to do while the knuckle was off so I'll tackle that next. It also looks like the tire (315/60/15 ET Street R) might be rubbing on the rear shock and I'm going to have to massage the pinch weld a bit more.
Got the car out for the first drive last night and what a difference over the old 4.5. Still need to get it tuned so I didn't get on it too hard but rolled into it from 2500 RPM in 5th up to about half throttle and 5500 RPM and the car pulled surprisingly hard. Hard enough in fact it looks like it hit a torque limit that it never had problems with running full out with the 4.5, so this thing should be making a good bit more power.
Here are some pics.
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