Hello ford modders!!!

hope we are all having a good weekend? anyways ive been looking around and im unable to find some info (tho i know its on here somewhere) on cutting through the body to create a cold (ram) intake. does anyone have a link? or photos. more help the better thanks

Hey could you go through the little pockets in the bumper bar where the fog lights usually go?

I did this mod on my EF, so i'll try and give you a little bit of info on whats involved etc.. Although, i will warn you now, it's most likely a "defect" as it is sort of cutting through a structural part of the body, well sort of lol..

I rigged my CAI duct from the passenger side vent in the bumper bar, up through the inner guard, and up into the bottom of the airbox. Theoretically, it shouldn't make much of a difference in terms of performance because this area of the bumper bar on the side is a low pressure area, however i noticed quite a bit of difference just by doing this, to me it was more noticeable than fitting the BA XR6T snorkel and BA intake piping on - works especially well on colder days/nights when the air is dense. Autospeed did a good article covering low pressure, high pressure areas etc and even made a CAI duct up on an EF Falcon which i may even try on my EF to see if i can move a bit more air into the snorkel.. http://autospeed.com/cms/title_Negative-Boost-Revisited-Part-5/A_107828/article.html

Anyways, you will need some sort of flex tubing (e.g. A/C vent duct, or you can buy plastic flex tubing specially made for making up CAI ducts which is what i bought. I find that if your falcon is equipped with ABS, you can just fit a 3" flex tube between the ABS unit and charcoal canister. If not, you should easily be able to fit larger ducting in place. You will need to jack the car up, remove the wheel on the passenger front and remove the splash guard so you can see what's underneath the guard. Remove your airbox assembly from the engine bay, what you then need to do is carefully judge where you will drill the hole for the duct to come up through the inner guard, making sure that when you drill the hole out in the guard it won't hit anything sitting underneath i.e. ABS unit where fitted and ABS lines etc.. I used a cordless drill and a 3" hole saw to do this, and then filed out the edges to comfortably accommodate the 3" ducting.

Once you've drilled the hole, file the edges smooth, and dummy fit your ducting, at this point you may need to remove the vent from the front bar to see how the ducting will sit behind it, on my EF Fairmont i had to slightly modify the area of the bumper just behind the vent as this is where cornering lamps can be fitted so they have brackets made up for mounting lamps. I had to cut this a bit to open up the hole big enough for the ducting to come through.




Next you will need to carefully judge where you will cut the hole in the airbox to allow the ducting to enter the airbox and ram the air into the filter. It's pretty much impossible to cut a circle in the bottom of the airbox as the ducting will line up around the bottom corner of the airbox so i ended up cutting a box shape and stuff the ducting up into the hole.



Once that is done, secure the ducting in place using zip ties or whatever to hold it still, refit everything that you have removed from the vehicle and you are pretty much good to go. With the ducting i bought, it came with a polished alloy bellmouth to fit at the of the ducting to encourage better airflow into the ducting so i placed one inside the ducting just behind the vent cover, so i would suggest making one up out of PVC pipe to fit just before the entrance into the ducting.

And that's pretty much it

Looks good but tell me does it or did it make any differance to the performance or the running of your engine?

Alan

It definitely made a difference to the performance of the car, especially at 80-120kmh and onwards etc, not that i do speeds like that all the time but you do test things out when you do mods like this on quiet back roads or on the highway . It doesn't feel any different when driving in traffic as there isn't much ram air effect at those speeds but i noticed quite a bit difference when the car is moving and you plant it, from say 50-60kmh, it feels much more responsive and once it hits ~80kmh it just seemed to pull like it never did before - would be interesting to see how much of a difference placing the ducting in a high pressure area would make.

Obviously, this is all a "seat of the pants" comparison. Trying to gauge the exact performance difference from mods like this on a real dyno are near on impossible, but i can honestly say it did improve the performance of the i6 quite a bit

this with the air holes cut into the side of the air box seem to be a very common mod that people complete- the only problem that i see with the one is what happens if you go thru a big a** puddle??

Luckily in NZ, we don't have many random floods leaving big puddles everywhere, so i'm safe

Seriously though, i don't think it will be too much of a problem as long as you don't go driving full speed into a huge puddle. With the piping i have it has little ribs in it so i guess the water would just sit there and not make it up into the airbox at all.

I remember a couple of days after i first did this mod, it absolutely p****d down as i was on the highway coming home, the thought did cross my mind of water possibly getting into the airbox as i never did consider this while doing the mod, so when i got off at the exit, i pulled into the nearest servo just to check, popped the bonnet, unclipped the airbox lid and saw not one spot of water in there . I was kind of amazed as i had been going 100kmh through the rain and thought the air might of pushed a bit of water up through the ducting but it wasn't to be, there was only a few beads of water sitting in the ducting which could be seen from looking in the bumper bar vent but that was about it. After all, the duct will be making an upward 90 degree turn from the bumper to the airbox so you would need some serious pressure to push water up that far.

One downside to this mod is that the air filter and box may need regular cleaning, because it does pick up a fair bit of dust and on the odd occasion, a few bugs lol

thanks heaps guys, i recently done it with a 3" flexpipe i got from bunnings.... noticed a smoother acceleration and my intake pipeing was cooler.

Your right Nathan if your like me you like going through the puddles especially when some one's on the side off the road SPLASH

Took a while of searching to find someone elses air ram, ive a pvc one planned very similar but with a bigger mouth (cutting out the entire back section where that cover pops out, then a big mouth glued into the back of the bar. fed into the bottom of the air box directly into the centre of the filter

meh, something to do

I've just done exactly that, it can be done very easily.

Found the time to fit my 90mm pvc cai pickup. Im very pleased with how it turned out, seems a bit more responsive. But when i drove it afterwards it was dark and raining heavily, so i cannot comment on intake noise. I will source a boost gauge this week and see how close to '0' (natural atmospheric) i can get with and without.

Hopefully i can score 1-2psi boost at highway speeds, that would be nice but i suspect i will need to seal the airbox for a full 'air-ram' effect.

Horrid pics, its dark, its wet, its dirty, its not finished, but have a look-see.