I'm moving the battery behind the passenger seat, so I used the now vacant space for CAI interface.


The lid is made of 18g sheetmetal. Please ignore the mess on my welding table, it always looks like my garage barfed on it by time I get done with any project.


The structural steel frame adds back some of the lost rigidity and the four posts will allow even pressure to be applied to the gasket like a center bolt valve cover.


Closing off the factory opening should help keep the inlet air cool but requires horn relocation. I'll add a shroud of some sort to protect the filter and i might close it all off and go for a true ram air system.


There is a .100" gap at the flange to allow for controlled gasket compression. A hole was added on the side of the box for hose clamp access -- I'll use a plastic plug to close it off.

 

Very nice. Probably one of the best looking concepts and executions of a CAI I've seen on here. Please keep us posted on your progress.

 

Oh my GOD! Thats Sweet

 

Do you plan on putting the factory plastic shrouds back in place to keep the filter dry?

 

Thanks guys

Regarding the plastic bits. I'll probably put the factory fender liner back in but I am not going to rely on just that to protect the filter. I will likely build a partial or full enclosure with some sort of forward facing inlet opening(s). If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

 

I see headlights so it must be a bird. What year and body style is it?
Gotta know where you have incoming air.

I'd say best bet is to just leave it there put your plastic fender well back in and blocking off the 'horn hole' is an excellent idea. The point of a CAI is obviously to get your filter away from the heat of the engine bay, making 'ram air' isn't going to force anymore air into the motor. And as long as air has a way to get to the filter and take full advantage of its size your golden. No sense in having 360* of filter if your only going to use 180*.

Oh, and btw that thing looks slick. Nice work.

 

Awesome job! I've seen this before with Spike-Z's beautiful WHITE IROC!! In case you have not seen his car, then you must see it, along with pics of how he routed his air filter, here:

http://ls1tech.com/forums/conversion...oc-swap-7.html

This guy lives near me actually and is a great guy actually helped me with a few questions I had. His username is Spike-Z on here as well I think.

 

LT1 Swapper has a Formula, pretty sure it's an 89.

I love Spike's white IROC, and I love his build, but I think I like the sealed lid LT1 Swapper has going on. It's a lot more work (appears he used a metal brake and bead roller) but really looks nice and should function well too.

I think if water can't directly splash on the filter it will be fine exposed how it is. One other idea I've had could be to mount a forward facing duct or a scoop to feed air to a sealed lower housing. The duct could blow it directly into the lower box and with a proper baffle in place it would not get the filter wet yet still fill the the enclosure with cool fresh air. The baffle could be similar to how the stock IROC air boxes are baffled, but a much less restrictive design in this case.

 

That's the first I've seen of Spike Z's car -- what a stunner. Funny, I'll be in Montreal this week.

1MeanZ is right, I used a sheet metal brake and bead roller for most of the features in the lid. I don't have a pan brake though, so I had to weld the sides onto it. And yes, it's an 89 Formula Firebird.

I am presently leaning towards making a box with a forward facing inlet which I may try to plumb for a ram air. The ram air effect is not going to be huge, but probably won't be much additional work over the lower filter box. I'll just need to figure out how to pull air in from a high pressure region.

 

Slightly off topic, but what steering box is that?

 

It's a 600 Series from Detroit Speed. It's not quite a direct fit as the box has some geometry that interferes slightly with the frame rail sheetmetal. The work around is to pound the offending sheetmetal flat or cut it out and weld a flat piece in. My box was milled to clear the interference. If I had to do it over, I'd mod the sheet metal on the frame rail -- it's really not that big of a deal, but at the time Detroit Speed was looking at trying to make the box a one for one swap into a third-gen.

 

looks great

 

Looks awesome man! Just an idea for the cold air ducting, I was thinking of gutting out a stock foglight and running some tubing out the back to flow up to the filter. That's probably as close to "ram air" as you can get on our cars.

 

This has been done before, hawks even sells their version of it. Personally, I would like to see this accomplished without removing the fog lights because having air ducts that are visible in the front of the vehicle makes it look pretty bad IMO..