Intake Kit Supplement for CRV and Pathfinder

Transcription

1 Intake Kit Supplement for CRV and Pathfinder This guide will briefly outline how to install the intake kits for the Honda CRV and Nissan Pathfinder. This is a pretty basic job, but for the average person plan on about two hours. If you finish early then kick back and have a drink or something. First off, we at Colorado mountain rally are not the ones working on your car, you are. Therefore anything you do to yourself or your car is solely and indisputably your responsibility. We will claim no legal liability for anything you do. Please be careful, use common sense, and always follow applicable instructions or safety warnings. With that said, let s get started! So first you will need basic hand tools. A flat head and Phillips screwdriver as well as a basic metric socket set is a good place to start. Maybe have some pliers, wire cutters, and a cordless drill with some drill bits handy. If you are using a power tool, always use safety glasses. We also recommend gloves. SECTION 1: Honda CRV So pop open your hood with your engine cool and here s what you see. This is the CRV sport.

2 If you have the regular model, this is what you are going for. Here is what you are going for with the sport model. It s pretty much the same. Note your connecting tube will be shiny and nice, we just used black pipe to demonstrate. Start by removing the air cleaner box.

3 Pretty basic. The air cleaner housing is held to the chassis with some rubber grommets though. Don t be afraid to yank pretty hard once the bolts are out. Also you can just disconnect the intake air duct from the air cleaner housing. Leave the other end installed on the throttle body. Here is what it will look like with the air box out and the intake air duct still installed.

4 So that s all you need to get out of the way to get the kit in and functional. You may notice though that there is a black tube under where the air cleaner box was. This loops under the chassis and comes back up again near where the transmission is, but still under the air cleaner box. This is called the resonator. It s more or less an intercooler, as it brings air from in the engine bay down towards the ground to cool it off before feeding it back up to the filter. It is also a bit of a muffler, because some engine sound leaks out through the intake. Let s not lose sight of the most important thing about the resonator, its HEAVY!

5 We took the resonator out on our car. If you want to do this, get under your car on the passenger side. You will notice the plastic panel in front of the wheel can be removed by taking out a few 10mm bolts and some plastic securing tabs that look like a Phillips screw in a plastic washer. Once this panel if off the car, you can reach up in there with the 10mm wrench and undo the four bolts that connect the resonator to the chassis via a thin metal bar. Take out this bar too, since it has no purpose in being there without the resonator. Once this is out, make sure nothing is in the way and there are no more bolts or screws holding it on. Then yank out the resonator. If you decide to take out the resonator, you can improve the flow of cold air to the filter element with a 90 degree elbow for rain gutters. You can find them at a home improvement store like home depot and lowes for a few dollars. Use a sheet metal screw to attach this gutter to the vertical plastic wall that s in front of your tire. Aim the top of the elbow so it blasts cold air up through the hole in the chassis where the upper tube from the resonator used to come out. In front of the other end of the elbow is the plastic part of the front bumper. You can drill a few holes in this to bring in cold air, see the final pictures for the hole locations. Be sure not to drill through anything metal as this could compromise the integrity of the front end.

6 Now back to the engine compartment, where we will install the filter. Put the chrome 6 straight tube into the intake air duct, right where it used to connect to the air box. The intake air duct has a built in spring clamp, but if you don t trust it or live in a warm climate you may want to secure it with an additional ring clamp. Use the chrome connector ring that comes with the straight tube to connect the 6 tube to the chassis. Use the bolt holes where the intake box used to mount. You can also get a thin strip of sheet metal and wrap it around the pipe, then drill a hole in it and secure the sheet metal to the chassis (this is how we did it in the intro pictures, it doesn t look as nice but it works). Either way extend the air duct hose so that about ¾ inches of the straight pipe extends past the mounting ring. This is where the filter will attach.

7 With the filter, first loosen the ring clamp and make sure all the ring inserts are fit in there snugly. Then slide it onto the 6 straight tube and tighten the ring clamp. This sounds easy, but make sure that the rings inside the filter all fit together nicely when you install it. This will make the filter sit nicely on the tube and reduce the chance that it will fall off. Look carefully at the opening below the filter in this picture. Do you see the rain gutter elbow? That directs cold air from in front of the bumper straight to the filter. As an added design bonus, because there is not a tube or anything that directly routes the air, if you ever drive through deep water it will simply go around the gutter instead of being in a tube that will get sucked into the engine. Bad news if that happens, so don t put a tube from anywhere on the car to the filter. We mention this because sometimes people like to do this, and there are a few pictures of this floating around on the internet. Don t do it, it s a bad idea.

8 Notice the holes in the passenger side of the bumper. Behind these holes is the 90 degree gutter elbow. We also took off the front grill to get more air to the radiator. You don t have to do this; we did it because the radiator was having a few problems. Thanks for reading and good luck! Based on how much power you get from this you may consider a few more engine upgrades. Based on the cost, ease of install, end result, and overall reliability, here is what we recommend (in this order): Ultra low impedance ignition wires and pulstar spark plugs with low impedance battery ground and alternator lead wires ~$100, an ecu specific OBD2 plugin chip ~$110, custom cat back exhaust system and polished performance exhaust headers ~350. Beyond that, if you need more power consider small tires or a bigger car. You can consider swapping the integra gsr engine into your car, adding a small turbo, or boosting your car with propane or nos. (in descending order of cost and descending order of reliability) Happy CRVing!

9 SECTION 2: Nissan Pathfinder This is for the first generation pathfinders, the ones we make lift kits for. So here is what your engine should look like when you first open the hood. Here is what you are going for

10 We used black pipe for demonstration, your pipes will be nice and shiny! So park the car and open the hood. Its best to work on a cool engine so let it cool off and be sure to support the hood well so it does not come crashing down on you. On that note, please review our little disclaimer at the beginning of this document. So open up the air box by releasing the metal clamps on the side and remove the filter element. Also disconnect the big hose that come out of the top of the airbox. Should look something like this.

11 So next remove the 10mm and 12 mm bolts that hold the lower part of the air box housing to the chassis. You will notice that under the lower air box housing is a pipe that goes below the chassis. This is called the resonator, it does the same thing as the resonator on the crv. It s also just as heavy and in the way, so if you

12 want to take it out here s how to do it. Crawl under the car in front of the driver side tire and look up at the bottom of the car. You will see something like this. Remove this plastic panel that sits in front of the wheel by removing the plastic pins and small bolts. You can then pull it away from the chassis and look up under where the air box is. You will see the resonator, which looks like this.

13 Remove the lower bolts that hold it to the chassis. You can also remove the little arm that connects between the chassis and the resonator. You will also need to remove some bolts at the top of the resonator to get the lower part of the airbox out. Get at them by getting behind the plastic panel towards the top of the wheel well, like this.

14 These are a bit hard to get at; a ratcheting flat wrench will really help you out here! So here are all the original components once they have been removed.

15 While you are down there you can add the 90 degree rain gutter elbow. Just like for the crv, screw it onto the plastic wall in front of the wheel so that the top of the elbow directs air directly into the opening where the upper resonator tube met the lower part of the airbox. The front part of the elbow should point towards the bumper. We arranged it so that it was right behind that little yellow light in the front bumper. This way we could drill holes under the light and that would direct air into the gutter elbow and then up directly to the air filter. Again the advantage of the gutter elbow is that you still get direct routing of cold air to the filter, but unlike a tube that goes directly to the filter this will not allow water to get sucked up into the engine when you have to bog through water. Here s where we drilled the holes.

16 So as you take out the resonator you will notice a little sensor that plugs into it. This will help the engine sense the temperature of the resonator air. Since there is no longer a resonator, we moved this sensor to where the gutter elbow directs air towards the filter. This is a picture of the chassis under where the airbox was.

17 Notice we drilled out one of the holes. This was to make it the same diameter of the rubber grommet the sensor was mounted in. See how snugly it fits in its new home?

18 The next step is to install the oil breather filter. You should have noticed a small tube that connected to the upper portion of the airbox. You can connect this tube to your existing air tube with a special adapter, but its easier just to put a little breather filter on it. You may need to wrap some electrical tape around the hose to make it fit snugly into the rubber section of the little breather filter. Tuck that little hose away nicely somewhere and secure it with a plastic zipper tie for good measure. Re-insert the MAF (mass airflow sensor, that black tube with the wires coming out of it) into the flexible rubber tube that goes back to the engine. Secure this with the factory ring clamp. Now you can bolt the MAF adapter to the MAF. Ours is shiny but it doesn t fit right so we had to re-drill the holes. Yours will be black but the holes will be right.

19 So now take the 3 rubber tube connector and put it on the MAF adapter. This will let you join the 90 degree air duct elbow to the MAF adapter. The other size of the elbow is what the filter element will secure onto. You can secure the filter using a spectre air intake securing kit, pn You can also get a really big plastic zipper tie or link a few together and secure the filter to the metal bar that goes from the chassis to that canister (the cylinder behind the little yellow filter in the above picture). You can also just not secure it at all, but we will recommend that you secure it somehow. Here is the end result.

20 One last note, before you secure the filter watch out for those two bolts coming out of the chassis that used to hold the airbox down. They cay puncture your filter, so push it until it fits between that bolt and the chassis where the headlight bulbs are. You want these bolts to be in front of the filter, not below it! If you are really pick you can add another gutter elbow to route the air back towards the filter again, right now if you have it like we do it will come up on the 90 degree duct elbow. We think as long as cold air is going into the general area of the filter it s all good. If you need more power, you can follow the same recommendations we made for the crv, but in all honesty I wouldn t recommend replacing the manifold on these cars unless you absolutely have to. The manifolds do tend to crack and it will make your check engine light come on, but you can drive the car like this for a very, very long time without too many issues. It s an SUV after all, right? We hope this has been helpful and thanks for buying our intake kits!

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