Installation of the Manifold, Day 1

The order is placed for the new suspension. Front and rear adjustable dampers with 2.5″ diameter springs and camber top mounts for the front. He’s telling me it’ll be 2-3 weeks before they ship, so in the meantime, I’ve got other stuff to do.

Starting out tonight was this mess:

The 2.0 intake manifold came off and I cleaned up the RTV that was previously used to seal things up.

At this point, there are no gaskets in place, I just wanted to test-fit and see what problems I’m going to run in to. I like the way it looks, though:

I’ve got a lot of clearance problems, though. The radiator inlet is rather unfortunately positioned:

And with that manifold in place, I only have about 2.5″ of clearance behind the radiator so the original fans aren’t going to fit. I’ve mocked up leaning the radiator forward to get that 2.5″ of space and that gives me a somewhat suboptimal, but maybe passable amount of clearance for the radiator hose. I think that the original throttle cable just might be long enough, so that’s good news. There isn’t much clearance between the throttle lever and the transmission, but there is just enough to make it work.

What I need to figure out is moving the radiator forward, getting a slim fan to replace the existing ones, and then coming up with a new pipe to go from the intercooler to the throttle body. I’ll also take the opportunity to re-run and clean up the wiring a bit, since it’s an ugly mess.