OK, so after doing a little bit of poking around the engine compartment of my Monte (which has been having problems eating motor oil, although my lead foot has something to do with that most likely) and after gutting my airbox i've decided to build my own CAI. By CAI I do mean a cold air intake, which is why I took these pictures and have a few questions. I was basically thinking of running some PVC down to the front bottom of the car, and use the airflow from the bottom grille to feed it. The pipe will follow the same way as stock, and right before the headlight there will be a 90 degree bend down, then another elbow going left towards the center of the car. Anybody see any problems with taking a lot of the cool air away from the radiator or sucking up rain/puddle water/water being splashed upwards?

Ok the first thing I did is pop the hood obviously. Here's what i'm looking at.


So then I removed the 3 plastic snap bolt things and wow, look at all that room for an air filter.


This is a shot standing from the passengers side of the car looking towards the drivers side. There's plenty of room to run some PVC down in there.


This is the same angle of the above picture except it was taken from under the car. I want to run a 90 degree bend DOWN infront of the headlight, then another 90 degree bend towards the middle of the car, and then the filter down by the bottom grille.



I'm just looking for some advice really, pointers, any problems I may encounter and anything else that will help with the install. I have all day tomr. to do it, so i'll post some pictures along the way for anybody that is interested.

Chris

 

having a tube there to just direct more cool air up to your air box is fine... but if you put a cone filter down there that would be a bad idea. but runing a pipe infront of the rad is more work then you need... if you put the filter in the fender, it will get pleny of cold air and be shielded much better from dirt and water.

for ideas and help look at my website. on pg 6 i have a few writeups and links to other writeups

 

I'm ditching the factory airbox completely. I actually may just leave it there to house the PCM, but I can run all the pipes through it atleast.

Why would it be bad to place a filter there? I'm guessing just from debris and water and crap, but i'm thinking it will be pretty well sheilded actually. If the tubing isn't expensive I might just do a FWI and put a cone down there for the hell of it.

Does anybody know anything about getting cold air from the fog light?

 

Now where was I? Oh yeah... So I decided to run the filter in the fog light bay. There is TONS of fresh air flowing through there from underneath the car. I was thinking about trimming the fenderwell cover thing a little bit to expose more of the road to the filter. There's probably plenty of air though through there even with the fog light in place.

I got the intake installed today. Basically it consists of a tube of 2.5" flex tubing, a 2" to a 3" rubber reducer (from home depot(let it sit in the sun, then spray some WD-40 onto to it to get the 2.5" tube to slide into it)) to go to the throttle body and a 2.5" to 3" metalcoupling to the air filter. Since the metal coupling was really hard to slide onto the tube, there was some obvious gaps. I filled these by first buying 10 ton super glue to glue the two pieces together. Spread it all around both joints of the pipe, pushed them together and let them dry. I then used a syringe with the super glue in it to fill in the gaps. Sometimes this works, other times the glue just runs down the inside of the pipe. To really fill the gaps I used muffler patch stuff and it worked great. The whole system is air tight.

Here's pretty much the whole set up. I think if I had to redo this, i'd use 3" piping, but the store where I bought it from didn't have the 3" in stock.


The filter sits in the little bay where the fog light used to be.



For those of you who would rather keep their fog lights, using the flex piping really helps when you need to have some play with it. I was thinking about putting the fog light back in until I saw this...



Very nice!

After playing with the pipe for a little bit, I was able to get enough room for the fog light. Still undecided.





By the way, you can see my moms 07 Monte in the back.

So, what are the differences between the stock airbox, and a custom CAI? The MAIN difference is the sound of the engine. When floored, there is a really deep hum resembling a V8 engine. With the added air, horsepower was also increased. My Monte TAKES OFF from stop, I was very suprised with how much pickup I gained just from this little mod. Spinning the tires is a whole lot easier, and i'd say I dropped atleast a second or two off my 0-60 time (unconfirmed ).

 

i would deff put the fog light back in.... direct air flow will also allow the filter to become saturated with water when it rains... this water is more then enought to damage your MAF sensor and other sensors like TPS and MAP. also the filter is rather low on the car.... i would move it to the fender well so you can raise it up some... with where it is now, water can splash in while driving and also soak the filter.

trust me my first FWI design i had it low like you have it and i had water issues. burnt out my TPS had a few other issues. the diff between stock air boxes and custom intakes are about 5 wHP on really good setups maybe like 10 wHP but that is stretching it. deff wont make a 2 sec diff in 0-60 but you can deff feel 5 wHP.

 

looks very nice, very good idea

 

I'm going to eventually put the fog lights back in. One of the bulbs somehow broke when I was removing the drivers side light, so i'm going to buy the bulbs on monday. There really isn't enough airflow going into the fog lights anyways, if you think about it they're designed not to get a lot of direct air. It would really only make a difference over speeds of 80 mph i'm guessing.

I can move the filter up a little bit, but I just moved it into the fender well area. Seems like it will do ok there, and it's really protected from water and hot air.

 

Also does anybody know something about reflective high temp. tapes? I was thinking of wrapping the intake pipe with this stuff to keep the pipes cool, and in turn the air being sucked through the pipes cool.

http://paceperformance.com/index.asp...;ProdID=184900

Chris