09 Aug Smurf Pants
A few hours of mill and welding time were all that remained. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at some Smurf Pants.
We’ve mentioned the name Smurf Pants a few times now when talking about Eric’s Z4M. To give you a little background, Eric’s Z4M has an RPI intake scoop and a Bimmerworld carbon-fiber airbox. The scoop fits and functions just fine, but the airbox is another matter. The outlet for it points towards the front of the Z4M’s frame, near neither the RPI intake scoop nor anywhere remotely large enough to fit a filter. As no parts were being swapped out at this point, we knew we could come up with something to point the filter towards the intake scoop and connect it to the airbox without needing to notch or cut the frame. As always, Smurf Pants started where the majority of our interesting designs start, the computer.
You may see now why we call it Smurf Pants. Since the Smurf Pants are made of aluminum, it might get very uncomfortable if the Smurf needs to do anything remotely related to movement. Perhaps we should call it Smurf Half-Body Cast, but that’s just too clumsy to say over and over. Either way, plenty of time was spent on the mill, cutting out the basic shapes. From there, we put the pieces back onto the mill to have the holes cut out, and we ended up with these four pieces:
We don’t usually need to make designs with as many contours as this piece, so watching this come to life on the mill was rather interesting. When all is said and done, the individual pieces came out looking pretty interesting, not that anybody could guess their purpose from a quick glance:
After everything was double-checked for fitment, we set off to the welding table, where we, um, welded it:
After some time to cool, we found ourselves the proud owners of one functioning pair of Smurf Pants. Seeing them in real life really makes the idea of Smurf Pants seem like a viable nickname. Another viable name would be Badonkadonk Smurf Pants, given the dimensions of one specific part of the aluminum piece:
Now that the pants were made, it was time to put them on. So we fashioned an aluminum clamp to connect the pants to the airbox:
And now everything is connected! Test-fitting is happening as we speak, and everything looks as if it’s coming up Milhouse. The two “legs” of the pants connect to the filter we’re using, which has a double outlet since it’s quite large.
On a final note, we forgot to mention that it was great to see everybody at Another Level this past weekend! Being surrounded by like-minded individuals is never a bad thing. Speaking of being surrounded by like-minded car fans, you should all come sign up for Motor Union!
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