Well after several months of no progress due to a plenum that was never built for me I have decided to just try and do it myself. I plan to make a template of the top of the TB's and have it cut out of 1/2" steel or aluminum. After that I guess I should use some 2" mandrel bent aluminum pipes which I can source cheap but finding someone that can weld this stuff is the hard part. I was thinking about talking to makenzie from this forum and see if he can do aluminum welding for me.

Does anyone know of any prefab'd(other than tweakit) intake plenums designed for the FC with an ITB setup? As for parts I think it would only be around 60-100 dollars and I am guessing the rest would be labour.



Santiago

 

ebay has a blank 1/2 template

 

blank 1/2" template? what does that mean? a template of the efi hardware tb's?

 

I welded mine together, it's for the TWM DCOE setup:
http://pengaru.com/~swivel/cars/rx-7...w_IMG_3999.JPG

maybe I can help you out with welding one together, I have a tig:
http://www.pengaru.com/~swivel/tig/

 

pengarufoo, Definatly interested if you could help me out. If you have an instant messenger let me know i'm on all the major ones.


Santiago

That badboy looks shaweet!

 

Nice! Just beautiful work there, u should post here more often Pengaru, custom work on FC's is too rare these days.

 

How is that hard? Open up Yellow Pages. Look up "Welding". Visit welder(s) of your choice. Easy...

 

Just becuase they can weld, doesnt mean they can weld a car part buddy. Welding that kind of tb takes some skill to get it perfect

 

That's just dumb. Welding is welding, the fact that it's on a car is totally irrelevant. A professional welder experienced with aluminuim would have no problems with something like this.

 

Not a lot of people in town have a Tig. I would much rather have someone with prior experience on an FC do it than some dude that does fences or something.


Santiago

 

pengarufoo thats very nice looking. would that fit around the a/c and p/s?

 

just break out the credit card and go here!

http://www.tweakit.net/shop/index.ph...196cff62f480e2

 

If you would read my post you would know I don't want this one. I don't like the design of it. And its 300 dollars plus shipping from australia. Thats a ******* rip anyway you look at it.

Santiago

 

Sorrrrrry I didn't finish reading all of it.
other than the price why don't you like it?

 

the manifold is only $175.00

 

duh.....plenum ignore my post...I'm stupid

 

Doesn't have to be TIG. There are wire feed welders which can be used on aluminium with the proper wire. Anyone who can MIG can deal with that. Hell, most old timers could probably gas weld it.

And since it doesn't exactly have to be structural, then it shouldn't be hard to find a welder to do it. Be warned though, that welding DOES NOT come cheap. Especially on aluminium.

It's highly likely that having it welded locally will cost almost, or slightly more then $300.

 

Agreed! you just have to grind the welds smooth and polish the sucker and cut what looks like the gasket between the UIM and LIM or is it a spacer?

and if you already did it post pics

 

Aaron Cake, thanks for the input on the welding. But my basic and major objection to going the route of a local welder is that many people around here don't do things "right" and seeing as it will be the air feed for my engine I don't want it to fail or something to go wrong. On a side note it is somewhat structural but only enough to hold it self up. This is basically an EFI equivalent of a "down draft" or vertical TB setup unlike pengarufoo's which is a side draft. And seeing as he has done this kind of work before and I like what he did for him self I would like to throw a little business his way in hopes of making it cheaper than 300+ dollars. If I can get it for 290 dollars with his help I would be happy. Any and all savings no matter how small, as long as they are not a sacrifice, are going to be explored. Oh yeah and I think I mentioned I don't like the design of the "tweakit" plenum.

Santiago

 

turbo80cid, I already have the manifold and throttle body and fuel rails and all that. i just need a plenum that can be routed to the IC outlet/filter

 

I finished it in a rush to drive the car to florida so it's not all cleaned up/finished, just functional.

The orange thing is a phenolic spacer, it's getting replaced with an aluminum one as the phenolic is wicking fuel out of the intake runners, it doesnt work too well when it's machined.

my AIM name is pengarufoo, 1987rx7guy, I can probably help you out I just need more info about what exactly you are doing, physical space limitations and where you need the inlet coming from, diameter, box volume etc... and I would need the necessary parts so I could fit it all together and make a jig for the air horns to bolt to while I weld the box together... mine is DCOE so the horn spacing was different, I don't have a IDA on hand to use for reference.

Aluminum has a high coefficient of thermal expansion, so this isnt as easy as one would think, it shrinks (cooling) ALOT more than it grows (heating) when welding and has a tendency to cause weldments to warp. On my intake I had some problems with warping while welding the area between the air horns to the bottom of the box, as any shrinkage here would have a dramatic effect on the overall geometry, and worse of all would effect the ability of bolting the thing up to the throttle body, the slightest amount of warping and the bolt pattern will be off, so the jig is very important and must be very strong.... which also increasese the risk of cracks during cooling of the welds, a bit of a catch-22.

If you have a local welder who knows how to weld aluminum (MIG and TIG processes work fine on aluminum, as long as you know what you're doing), it will probably be easier for you to go that route as you can bring the car to him and go back to him when you find out the inlet interferes with some part you forgot you had to install when you had it made. I'm in IL also so keep that in mind (shipping considerations).

 

I used to post often on nopistons.com, but the guy running the show over there is retarded, one thing led to another and at one point I was banned from there then immediately unbanned after he realized he had made a mistake bla bla I havent posted there since.

I'm on IRC (#rx7club, #rx7 on efnet and #cars on freenode) and I have a forum I started (and post any interesting things I'm doing on) here http://pengaru.com/forums/

I figured if I'm going to contribute my information to something it might as well be something I can control and gaurantee won't be ousting members of just because their ideas conflict with 'sponsors'. It has no sponsors, so thats simply not possible, I pay for the server out of pocket for my own needs, the forum is not why the server exists.... anyone is welcome to use the forum.

 

No offence man, but you need to get this utterly retarded idea out of your head. You need someone who is an expert at welding, not somone who knows a particular type of car. It is highly unlikely that any "FC expert" is also going to be a professional welder with the skills to weld light guage aluminium. It's just crazy to think you need someone who knows FC's to do this. If you can't find someone local who does race car fabrication (or can't afford them), then look for general and/or precision engineering workshops.

 

sweet I can't wait to see it finished.
This might be something I do next year.
good luck.

 

I certainly hear you about the half-assed jobs that people do, but it's also not a very critical part. According to Google, the population of Laredo Texas was 176,576 people in the year 2000. I have to believe that in a city that large, there is at least one welder capable of making a simple aluminium weld. London is about 150,000 people larger, and I have a list of 10 trusted welders that I have pesonanally dealt with on everything from stainless to aluminium.

That's not really structural.

I know what you mean. Remember that this will be a major killer of low end torque.

I'm building a similar system. No pics until it's done.


Having it done locally is worth the extra $10. At least then you have someone to complain to if it breaks.