My friend has the greddy turbo kit for his Civic EX w/ the 15g turbo on it. he's running 8psi and a custom i.c. His intercooler is HUGE. could this cause a problem w/ spool up? His car is an automatic, and he doesn't spool fully until around 4.3k Is this because of his stock torque converter??

 

Large intercoolers on small engines can and normally do hurt spool time.

 

Also, generally larger intercoolers drop more boost pressure, so if you are running a small amount of boost, use a small IC.

 

I have a question. does it matter if the in and out ports on the intercooler are on the side?

 

Generally if both ports are on the same side of the intercooler, less surface area of the cooler gets filled. The turbo obviously still has to fill up the whole intercooler but the vacuum of the motor sucks some air out before it can fill up the the other side of the i/c. Effectively what happens is you give the air less time in the intercooler because it just flows from the top to the bottom. Ideally you want to have the inlet and outlet on opposite ends so you have linear flow across the whole width of the i/c.