Any one have any plans for a home made CAI? I think it would be a lot cheaper than spending $200 on a k&N.

 

anybody?

 

I thought about it but I havn't seen a "homemade" one yet that doesn't look "homemade".You could come up with something cheap,thats easy enough,but they end up looking bad.
I myself don't like using household plumbing supplies or stovepipe on my car.
To come up with something that looks halfway decent you end up spending about what some of the good CAI's are running new.

If you are interested I have an Arizona Speed & Marine CAI that I will let go for $125.00.It is new,installed once(will need a filter mount,the flat sheetmetal piece)(I have the one that came with it but it was trimmed to work with something else) and I decided to go with a Lingenfelter setup.

 

I dont care what mine looks like. So I guess I will do some measuring and off to home depot I go!

 

I've seen it done before using black pipe found in the plumbing section, worked out pretty good. I just found a cheap moroso ($66) in good condition and went with that, haha.

 

 

If you want to make a homemade one. Get some thin wall 3" PVC and a 90, you can heat it up over a stove burner to "dent in" the part that comes off the maf. Buy a 3" connector to connect the pipe to the maf. Buy a 3" cone filter from autozone. I think you want the 8" one. Paint the thing flat black with some spray paint. oh and you'll need a crank case filter or cut a small little adapter to your 'CAI'. You'll see what I'm talking about when you take the stock intake off. These are kinda crappy directions, but it's late and I'm tired. If you have any questions, just ask.

 

I made one with 3 inch white pvc pipe. Off the MAF is a rubber connector attached to a 45 degree elbow using dryer vent clamps. Then there is about a 3 inch straight pipe out of that connected to a 90 degree elbow. The tube going down is about 15 inches long and it is connected to a dryer vent "scoop" mounted underneath to catch air. I don't have pics of this, and it's not pretty either but it works. I get laughs from it all the time. The black pipe would look better but I couldn't find any at the time. You have to move your ABS over to clear for the pipe.

 

Heres Mine:

I bought my intake off ebay WITH a K&N filter. The normal ebay filters i've heard are pretty crappy so I opted to spend the extra money on that. The piping is relatively the same as any other intake and I didn't think there was anyway to improve that or justify spending hundreds of dollars for it.

Like any other intake, the filter sits way down in the front, but after running it at the track I noticed that the piping was very hot. I have a buddy that does a lot of competition offroading and rock climbing and all that, which produces a lot of heat. He had wrapped a lot of his engine components, including his intake, in heat shield.

So me and him wrapped the intake and also covered up the intake elbow (as I've heard a hot intake elbow can reduce timing).

At that point I also thought that the heat produced by the engine was making its way down to the filter and therefore causing it to suck up the "heated air" as we all know is not as dense as cold air. I then blocked off the filter with heat shield as shown in the picture.





My next thought was that, the filter being in that tight space in the front was not getting all the air that it could be getting.

So I made a scoop for it which ensures that its always getting fresh and cold air.



Problems:

The scoop on the underside of the car isn't really doing much at the moment, as I've been told that the air dam creates a low pressure right behind it, which is right where the scoop is. The fix would be to cut a peice of the air dam, but I'm not sure if its worth it

Secondly, we double wrapped the elbow with heat shield to ensure that it doesn't get hot, but it doing so, it makes it very difficult to get back onto the throttle body. The fix was just to remove some of the heat shield and force it back on.

and Thirdly, it doesn't look pretty to some, but I think it optimizes performance which i'm more concerned about over appearance. And I think it actually looks pretty cool

Its not homemade, but its relatively cheap.

 

You can pick up a used intake on this sites parts for sale section or ebay. It's tube so it doesnt really go bad... I picked up mine for around $70. Recharge the filters or get new ones.