28 Dec A Fever Pace
Like we said yesterday, with the 4-day workweek and the end of 2010 approaching rather quickly, we’ve been running our fabrication gerbils at 110% pace in their stainless steel running wheels.
Today (and, by extension, the end of last night) has been moving quickly, but fabrication’s been moving even faster than that. All that meth we’ve been sneaking into Tom’s energy drinks is finally paying off, and trust us, that stuff isn’t cheap.
In actual news, though, Craig and AJ have planned, built and installed a custom intake and heat deflector for our good friend Lance’s black E36. The stock airbox was definitely a bit too constricting in terms of airflow, so we set about to simplify the whole equation. Removing the stock airbox and replacing it with an air filter and piping might be the easiest thing to do, but there’s always things to consider. First, if you choose to make it more like a cold-air intake, you run the risk of placing the filter too low in the car and, without proper shielding from the elements, the risk of rainwater or wintry mix entering the engine and hydrolocking the whole damn thing runs rampant. Second, if you choose to move the pipe closer to the interior of the engine bay, heat soak will prevent the air from being as cold (and compressed) as possible, decreasing available power and not living up to its potential. So, we found a middle ground.
We moved the filter a little lower than the whole airbox originally sat, so it could scoop up some of the airflow from the bottom of the vehicle. To remove the heat soak issue, we fabricated a shroud to go around the exposed filter, preventing additional heat from entering the filter from the engine bay. Behold, the best of both worlds!
As previously mentioned, the fast pace of fabrication meant that this was a relatively quick task. When all was said and done, it took quite less than an entire day’s worth of work to plan and fabricate both the shroud and the piping, and that includes adding the rubber trim to the metal shroud and allowing it to dry. The rubber trim helps to prevent any sort of rattling or other extraneous noise from bothering the driver, while allowing for a more flush finish against the intake pipe, giving less space for the heat to approach the filter. We’re very proud of how nice it sounds and how good it looks, so here are some pictures of the stock airbox, the space we had to work with, and the final product:
No Comments