rezinn

I've got an 87 camaro, and living in the valley in southern california it sometimes gets hot, especially in traffic. I've been questioning my home made ram air boxes as being the culprit for a while, since putting them in got rid of some place for air to flow to the radiator. So this last weekend I decided to redesign a better ram air box for only one side, and leave the other side open.

I started by removing the fog lights so air flow isn't impeded by them. I reinstalled the stock ducting that directs air through the radiator on the drivers side, and installed a sheet metal ram air duct consisting of four pieces that jam into place(its so large that no hardware is required), which wrap around the horizontal bar the fog light support was formerly mounted to, and then fit behind the grille when it is in place. The sheet metal takes up the entire area available and runs directly around the air filter on that side. It took a couple hours of disassembling and measuring to design the box with the largest volume, and then about an hour to cut the metal and bend it to the right angles. It helped to oversize it a lot to allow me to bend the sides into 90 degree angles so that the center pieces slid in place.

End result: Car runs 20 degrees cooler on the freeway, especially noticable in traffic. I also feel that this ram air design is 100 times better than my prior attempt, which was basically just a circular tube with a few 30 degree bends. Also looks much better. I epoxied a fine black plastic netting over the rear of the grille so it isn't just an empty orifice, and it really looks much better than I expected. The ram air pieces(four, top, bottom and both sides) were long enough to fit around the grille in the front, so it is basically air tight(due to the epoxy and the sheer size of the sheet metal) from entry to filter, and on into the engine. Well spent saturday in my opinion.