I just noticed this the other night, but my throttle body elbow is metal not plastic. It has the same basic shape of the plastic one. I never really paid attention to it till someone pointed it out to me. What I'm wondering is, if it was part of the upgraded SMIC or some custom part or was their a factory hard pipe?


This is an old pic so please ignore the home depot piping this is being taken care.

 

my stock was black plastic.

 

mine is also metal and my car is stock W stock intercooler

 

early models had the metal elbow, later models had the plastic. I dont know the US models, but in Japan, from late 1993 when the type R version 2 was introduced, it came with the plastic elbow. Im not sure why, my im wondering if it has something to do with the plastic having better heat transfer.

 

i do believe that only the 93s had the painted grey plastic elbow.. all others were black

 

Yes that's correct.

RotaryBuddha, make sure it's just not one of the painted 93 elbows. Many people over the years have thought their stock elbow was metal just because it was grey and attempted to polish it. I don't need to explain the results they got of that action.

 

lol

no, it was Mazduh cutting costs on a 32k car...a practice which ended up costing them far more, the stock engine bay has many cheap/failure prone components

 

weight was the prime issue

 

Buddha, your elbow looks like the painted plastic 93 elbow.

For a minute, I thought you had an HKS elbow, but yours doesn't have the obvious "HKS" on it..

 

DOH it is painted plastic.

 

You just had to show it off

 

That HKS elbow is like 600 bucks... I see it has a spot for injectors or something, but is it really worth it over the Greddy elbow?

 

That's not mine, I have a Greddy elbow. I took that pic from a thread about it a couple months ago.

 

My bad It is a nice looking piece though.

 

big willie strikes again

 

yah mine is silver and it is plastic i keep tapping mine with a wrench because i couldn't figure out if it was plastic or metal

 

That curious. Advantage to having metal vs. plastic in this case?

 

i think 93 models came with gray metal/ plastic elbows, while 94and up came with black plastic versions....

 

plastic=weight savings
metal=looks(polishing)/quality