Charge Pipes & Cold Air
Today I installed the DDM Charge Pipes I bought on the Solstice. They went on smooth and looked great!
While I was doing that I decided to give the eBay cold air intake a second look. When I got it, I wasn’t impressed and decided to not put it on. The main issue I had with it was the the fitting in the 90 Deg elbow, was just a king nipple with a vacuum hose. It wasn’t set up to attach to the stock quick connect. Also, I ordered it with a red filter and it came with one but they sent cheap blue couplings.
So, I got it back out to see if I could make it work. First thing was to find a way to adapt the correct quick connect male fitting to it. I had to find one first, because I wasn’t going to cut up my stock tube just to make this work. So a trip to the auto store was in order.
I carried the stock intake tube in with me and looked for something that had the same type of quick connect. What I found was a fuel filter.
This had the correct fitting on the inlet side. I put it in my vise and using my band saw, I cut the inlet tube off of the filter.
Now I checked the fit for this piece over the king nipple on the eBay intake. It was a very loose fit. So I took some heat shrink tubing and built up 3 layers, shrinking each one individually, until the fit was tight. I then pressed the cut off fitting over the nipple. It was a very tight fit.
Now it was set, I could use the stock quick connect to hook the vacuum line to the intake. Below is that connector.
The next thing I did was buy some better quality red silicone couplings. Mounted everything up and was pretty happy. The only thing I didn’t like was the strange angle it pointed, in order to get to the cooler air away from the engine. Below is a picture from the eBay ad about how it was suppose to look.
For now I just ran it strait in front of the engine but that isn’t the best place to pull cool air from. So I am going to order some more 3″ tubing, to turn it forward and down. I have a mounting bracket that comes off the front of the engine and secures the intake from moving. I couldn’t find a way to get a picture of that.