This was my first intercooler. Cost me $ 25 at a pick and pull. It was the only one my dad could find. It's off some kind of turbo dodge.
It was origionally mounted inside the engine bay in a poor location but the car did 146whp at 5/6psi with no audible detonation on the stock ECU. I eventually mounted the intercooler in the front bumper for better cooling.
This is my current intercooler. It cost me around $200 to buy it and modify it. It's off a mitsubishi starion.
It's also mounted in the front bumper. There have been times I've come back from a drive and felt the end tanks of the new cooler and the intake side is hot and the outlet side is cool too the touch.
Here's both side by side.
Both these kinds of intercoolers can be had fairly cheaply if you know where to look, but I wouldn't recommend the dodge one unless you bought several of them and welded them together. Still the new one is smaller than I'd like but it will take me too the power I want and for more power I'm thinking of a homemade N-ter Cooler setup.
So, in conclusion you don't have to spend $800 for a intercooling solution. And if your compression is as high as you say it is, I wouldn't go FI even with intercooling unless you get some low comp pistons and forged rods. Cause your fuel& timing managment will be the biggest sticking point and you'll wind up spending well over $800 just on that. There's a guy on the Focus forums running 8psi non-intercooled on the stock block and he autocrosses regularly with no problems but he's using a $2000 pectel unit for engine managment.
My 2 cents. This is from somebody with the only daily driven Zetec turbo, designed and built from scratch, on the CDW27 platform, that I know of.
