April 1, 2010 - Spent a long day working on the intake.
And of course, I didn't take any pictures. The Pipercross plenum showed up. These are made in either left-hand or right-hand configurations, with my application being the right-hand version. Naturally, I was only able to obtain the opposite.
No worries, all I had to do was to fit the base plate on upside down. But that interfered with my fuel rail. After some poking and prodding, I figured out that the plenum was made in a couple of pieces. I separated the two, flipped one over and voila, my left-hand plenum was now the right-hand version! I had to epoxy everything back together, so that meant I wasn't going to be finishing today.
In the meantime, I cut the base plate to match my runners and installed the short air horns. Due to the shape of the plenum, I also had to relocate the idle speed control valve and reroute some wiring. The latter needed to be done anyhow, it was kind of rough looking. Since I knew I wouldn't have time to test the car any more before the track day on Saturday, I unshackled the car from the dyno.
Over to a lift, I swapped out the current exhaust midpipe (with an empty cat) for anther one that we'd been using for testing. I also needed to find a place to fit an air filter. One of the problems I'd found with the IRTBs on the road was that my intake air temperatures were quite high. The new plenum will not only hush the car (important for Laguna Seca on Friday!) but will give me the opportunity to pipe in fresh, cool air. I decided to try a filter mounted behind the front bumper. It's not the best place if I decide to ford a river, of course, but for normal use it should do just fine. After a bit of thinking, I decided to bolt the top of the filter to a handy flange. Three bolts with big backing washers going through a top that's about 3/4" thick (really, I was amazed at it!) and it's solidly mounted. I'll run the air hose in it tomorrow and the car will be ready. I'll also take some photos.
Is it going to be quieter? Oh man, I hope so.
tags: dyno, intake, IRTB, plenum |
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