Another day on the car before the Christmas shenanigans start, although I have limited photos as time was getting on and ended up working for an hour in the dark finishing off so no completed pics yet.

Have to say that this focus is a pain to work on. Every nut is awkward, every clamp is positioned so that to undo it is nigh on impossible. The amount of parts you need to remove to gain access to the bit you need is crazy. But anyway, much knuckle rash later I got the front stripped.



Lesson for anyone doing similar with their ST, the plastic flaps you see above sit in a plastic frame with an electronic motor moving them. Seems there may be a temp sensor built in as I left it off when rebuilding the car and now the fan is on constantly. So need to strip down again tomorrow to put it back on.

Got all the intake system stripped down and after nearly an hour of swearing and lack patience I managed to get the charge Pipe off, here's a comparison pic of the two together.



So next job was to swap the intercoolers over. Decided to again do a quick comparison between the standard and Mountune one.





Not a massive amount in it, the Mountune one is slightly taller, same depth and 2 less rows of fins in it. Not sure how that works with it's efficiency. To be honest had I known they were so similar I may not have bothered buying it. I will say though that the build quality is spot on, fits straight in and bolts up very easy. This is an example of a well though out product for me:



That's were it ends on the pics of it coming together sadly as I said, time was getting on and needed to finish, I need to strip it down again tomorrow though to refit the fin blade system. One potential problem is that this boost pipe popped off:



I am hoping it is because I didn't tighten the clamp enough because if it's now over boosting then I am not sure why.

Another observation I made when working on the car was the size of the exhaust.



That's a decent bore size for a standard exhaust and from the limited angles I had it seemed fairly well bent, maybe not mandrel bends but as good as most aftermarket systems. Indeed, I haven't seen a system that has a tailpipe as nice as the standard one so other than longer life I am struggling to see reason to "upgrade" it to a stainless system.