- Sun Apr 04, 2010 11:52 pm
#185550
Ok, for all those of you out there with the obx venom style intake manifold who think you now have a $165 door stop, let me tell you..........
IT CAN GO ON, IT WILL WORK, AND IT MAKES DECENT POWER. That having been said, it was a LOT of work to get these parts on.
I have already done a bottom end build, boosted the engine, p and p head, etc. When it came time to buy an intake mani/throttle body setup, I took some time and did a bit of research. I also dont have a Trump sized budget to do my build on either. So, I decided to go with the obx intake, obx fuel rail, 440 cc injectors, and a blackworks racing 66mm throttle body. I wanted to open up the intake side about as wide as possible to help the boost get in there. (I realize that there are larger throttle bodies available, but this was abouth the max for this intake mani.)
First thing was mocking up the intake. Out of the box, it absolutely would not go on the head. We drilled all of the bolt holes a few sizes larger, and one of the end holes in particular was quite a way off. We almost had to slot it. Once that was done, we had to smooth out the mounting surface. As opposed to what I have read on some other forums, it was not so far off that it had to be decked at a machine shop, but it did need some surface work.
Next was mounting the tb to the intake. That was a breeze.....everything fit fine.
Then we noticed that there was no mounting place for the throttle cable. This part is not for the faint of heart, because we had to fab one by using some steel u channel and the OEM throttle bracket. Didnt take long to make, but getting it positioned was a nightmare.......there is no good place to bolt the bracket between the head and the intake mani, so i ran it the length of the fuel rail, and bolted it to the inner fender, near the shock tower. It was pretty good, but it took a few massive zip ties to keep it steady enough for the throttle to not be erratic, or held open to like 2500 rpm.
Once we mounted the intake manifold, we started to notice that there were no provisions for the iac valve. (In case you dont know, the iac mounts to the intake and allows a little bit of air to bypass the throttle body when it closes completely, thus keeping your car from dying when it comes to a stop.) This thing has both vacuum and water that go through it. I went to the local metal yard, and bought a piece of aluminum stock to mount the iac to. (There is not an actual vacuum port on the iac, only open holes.) We fabbed a little iac manifold out of this piece of stock, and in retrospect i should have used a little thinner aluminum, because you have to tap the holes for the vacuum fittings, and since I used a thicker piece of aluminum, it took a while. I made a template off of the back side of the iac (the open side) and transferred it to the aluminum, which gave me the holes to mount the iac, and the 2 for the vacuum fittings. Took about 2 hours with tapping the holes by hand. We grabbed a vacuum line (the feed side has to come from a spot before the throttle body) off of the front port under the map sensor, went to the iac "in" side (check your haynes manual for direction of flow), then went from the iac "out" back to a vacuum port on the intake. For the water, we tapped into the heater core lines. There is a flow path on the heater core lines, so again, check your haynes manual. THIS IS IMPORTANT TO GET PROPER IDLE..........you must run the water lines, not just the vacuum, because the iac has a sensor that reads the water temp and tells the ecu to quit dumping fuel for warm up. IF YOU DO NOT PLUMB THE WATER LINES - it will run like crap. It will load up and run so rich it will not even want to go. We tried it before and after plumbing the water lines, and it was a completely different beast. Also, this is where we installed the BLOX fuel pressure regulator, which helped fine tune the idle a bit more. We mounted the iac manifold to the firewall with zip ties for now.
After all that, and about an hour tweaking the idle and fuel pressure, we took it out for a drive. I should also note that the OBX intake has a 70 percent larger air intake volume over OEM, so that might be what I attribute the somewhat deeper exhaust note to.....it sounds pretty sweet. At any rate, it really seemed to get up and move. i am going to try to get it dynoed soon, but unfortunately i have no data to compare it to from before the intake went on.
All in all between trouble shooting, modifying and tweaking, I would say we had a solid 15 hours in the job, with an additional 4 to 5 of bs ing and trying to think up solutions. If you have a drill, some guts and some basic tuning sense, you should be able to make this combo work for you.
Hopefully this helps someone out there in civic land.
I know these pics are not great, they are from my phone.
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ5.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ4.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ3.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ2.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ1.jpg
IT CAN GO ON, IT WILL WORK, AND IT MAKES DECENT POWER. That having been said, it was a LOT of work to get these parts on.
I have already done a bottom end build, boosted the engine, p and p head, etc. When it came time to buy an intake mani/throttle body setup, I took some time and did a bit of research. I also dont have a Trump sized budget to do my build on either. So, I decided to go with the obx intake, obx fuel rail, 440 cc injectors, and a blackworks racing 66mm throttle body. I wanted to open up the intake side about as wide as possible to help the boost get in there. (I realize that there are larger throttle bodies available, but this was abouth the max for this intake mani.)
First thing was mocking up the intake. Out of the box, it absolutely would not go on the head. We drilled all of the bolt holes a few sizes larger, and one of the end holes in particular was quite a way off. We almost had to slot it. Once that was done, we had to smooth out the mounting surface. As opposed to what I have read on some other forums, it was not so far off that it had to be decked at a machine shop, but it did need some surface work.
Next was mounting the tb to the intake. That was a breeze.....everything fit fine.
Then we noticed that there was no mounting place for the throttle cable. This part is not for the faint of heart, because we had to fab one by using some steel u channel and the OEM throttle bracket. Didnt take long to make, but getting it positioned was a nightmare.......there is no good place to bolt the bracket between the head and the intake mani, so i ran it the length of the fuel rail, and bolted it to the inner fender, near the shock tower. It was pretty good, but it took a few massive zip ties to keep it steady enough for the throttle to not be erratic, or held open to like 2500 rpm.
Once we mounted the intake manifold, we started to notice that there were no provisions for the iac valve. (In case you dont know, the iac mounts to the intake and allows a little bit of air to bypass the throttle body when it closes completely, thus keeping your car from dying when it comes to a stop.) This thing has both vacuum and water that go through it. I went to the local metal yard, and bought a piece of aluminum stock to mount the iac to. (There is not an actual vacuum port on the iac, only open holes.) We fabbed a little iac manifold out of this piece of stock, and in retrospect i should have used a little thinner aluminum, because you have to tap the holes for the vacuum fittings, and since I used a thicker piece of aluminum, it took a while. I made a template off of the back side of the iac (the open side) and transferred it to the aluminum, which gave me the holes to mount the iac, and the 2 for the vacuum fittings. Took about 2 hours with tapping the holes by hand. We grabbed a vacuum line (the feed side has to come from a spot before the throttle body) off of the front port under the map sensor, went to the iac "in" side (check your haynes manual for direction of flow), then went from the iac "out" back to a vacuum port on the intake. For the water, we tapped into the heater core lines. There is a flow path on the heater core lines, so again, check your haynes manual. THIS IS IMPORTANT TO GET PROPER IDLE..........you must run the water lines, not just the vacuum, because the iac has a sensor that reads the water temp and tells the ecu to quit dumping fuel for warm up. IF YOU DO NOT PLUMB THE WATER LINES - it will run like crap. It will load up and run so rich it will not even want to go. We tried it before and after plumbing the water lines, and it was a completely different beast. Also, this is where we installed the BLOX fuel pressure regulator, which helped fine tune the idle a bit more. We mounted the iac manifold to the firewall with zip ties for now.
After all that, and about an hour tweaking the idle and fuel pressure, we took it out for a drive. I should also note that the OBX intake has a 70 percent larger air intake volume over OEM, so that might be what I attribute the somewhat deeper exhaust note to.....it sounds pretty sweet. At any rate, it really seemed to get up and move. i am going to try to get it dynoed soon, but unfortunately i have no data to compare it to from before the intake went on.
All in all between trouble shooting, modifying and tweaking, I would say we had a solid 15 hours in the job, with an additional 4 to 5 of bs ing and trying to think up solutions. If you have a drill, some guts and some basic tuning sense, you should be able to make this combo work for you.
Hopefully this helps someone out there in civic land.
I know these pics are not great, they are from my phone.
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ5.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ4.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ3.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ2.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/b ... e/civ1.jpg
