“Gonzo” intake tube coming together. My aluminum welding is improving.
Assembled on the car things are starting to come together. Radiator low with room to duct it up out the hood. Intake is a straight shot over the radiator to the cool, high pressure area in the nose.
Overall, it’s looking like I’ll get away with the intake design being pretty simple. But, there’s still some details that take a bit of time. Specifically, to fit the LFX’s intake air sensor which normally mounts to a boss in the stock intake tract.
I’m sure there’s some plastic bit from the Camaro that could be hunted down and adapted, but I don’t have that on hand. With the objective of getting the sensor in the intake tube, there’s plenty of ways that could be accomplished, but in my mind since we’re working with an aluminum tube here there’s really just one right way to do it – and that’s to make a boss similar to the factory one but out of aluminum and weld that in. And frankly, I like making stuff!
Now, if I had a bridgeport mill or CNC, this would be a one-tool job. Buuut I don’t, so let’s move on – I can cry myself to sleep over it later. Working with what I’ve got handy, we’re often having parts cut from the waterjet so I was able to draw up a part that would at least get me part of the way there and that was cut from some 0.500″ material.
The part, fresh out of the waterjet with the intake sensor beside it:
The center hole would have been a bit of a pain to cut in thick material with hand tools, so the waterjet was a welcome easy button there.
Because the waterjet only operates on two axis, there’s still some work to be done on this; the base needs to be shaped to fit the curvature of the intake tube:
So I got to pretend I was a human vertical mill for a little while and carefully shaped the base with an air grinder.
Progress:
That got cleaned up with a hand file. That underside doesn’t need to be particularly pretty, the important part is just for the fit-up with the tube to be nice and tight for welding.
Dug the engine wiring harness out of a box to make sure the sensor’s wiring could reach to where I wanted to put the sensor, and then settled on a location. You can’t really tell in this pic, but I chose to point the sensor vertically in the bottom of the tube, just forwards of the throttle body:
Then I marked the location of the center hole on the tube, cut that section out, and then got to welding:
And yes, I miiiight have done shark teeth on my new welding hood to match the car’s livery one night after lots of coffee…
Drilled and tapped the two pilot holes for M4 hardware and the sensor fits up nicely:
It was immediately after this that someone clued me in to the fact that GM themselves make an aluminum weld-on flange for exactly this purpose for about $15! Oh well.