AFI Intake Manifold Install and Review
08-05-2010, 03:19 AM
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AFI Intake Manifold Install and Review
Hey everybody!
I don't post up on the FI forum very often, but I haven't seen very many installs or reviews of the AFI Intake Manifold so I thought I would post up the process of my install!
Day I:
First Impression(s):I received intake manifold and all I could say is WOW! The quality is amazing! The differences between the AFI manifold and the OEM manifold are night and day! The plenum is HUGE! I could fit my entire arm through the plenum (I'm skinny though
) The throttle body inlet is roughly 78-79mm. Velocity stacks built into the plenum, each stack is machined to match the runner next to it; unlike the OEM intake manifold where the runners vary in length. Overall, I could not be happier with the quality and it actually far exceeded my expectations. Pricing on the manifold is set to be competitive with other manifolds in the market. I tried to buy the Hypertune manifold from MrSantos a few months back and I'm actually glad that the deal didn't go through (he was unsure of parting out the intake manifold from the motor). While the Hypertune manifold on other cars has proven to make great power. The AFI seems like it would be no different; if not better as the plenum seems to be much larger and build quality is much stronger. I have seen Hypertune manifold easily destroyed by high HP cars. The AFI manifold is welded in any seam that could/would be weak.
Intall
I asked Josh @ AFI for the throttle body flange to be machined for a Q45 (90mm) throttle body. Josh had actually asked me which throttle body flange I wanted to go with prior to me sending in payment. I thought that I would be stuck with the sizing for the S2000 (which is rather limited in terms of anything larger than 74mm. My personal preference is cast throttle bodies; they are much less likely to stick and are much smoother to operate. Getting off the line from a stop light is much easier when you have a cast throttle body (in all the throttle bodies that I've ever owned or tried). We did encounter some type of error in the throttle flange machining though. Josh was more than willing to have the flange fixed at no additional cost to me but I am on a time crunch and need the car up and running by this weekend. Josh asked that I send in my throttle body so that they could test out other manifolds flanged for the Q45 throttle body, so there should be no other mix ups in the future!
I ended up ordering a cast aluminum BBK 80mm throttle body from Summit Racing. It was less than $200 and one of the largest offered in cast form for the 88-95 Mustang (5.0) which AFI had machined a 2nd set of holes; AFI can machine you 2 sets of throttle body bolt patterns (i.e. S2000 & Mustang bolt patterns) Summit ships REALLY quickly and the throttle body would arrive on Day II. I also ordered a -16AN 90 degree fitting as well as a -16AN weld bung. AFI provides you with a AN fitting water neck (which is O-ringed and also has a prevision for the stock ECT sensor). I had a mock up motor in which I mounted the intake manifold and tried to create a plan of attack. I will also be installing ID1000's, the new AEM Series II EMS, and retuning everything for the new setup. Here are some of the pictures of the mock up. (These pictures are off of my phone. There are better pics for Day II).
Front view with the 80mm BBK Throttle body (extremely smooth butterfly. I'm actually really happy with the quality of it):
-16AN Fitting w/ the weld on bung attached. We will use a partial hard line for the next month until I tear down the car again to build a V-Mount:
An inside view of the AFI Intake Manifold. As you can see, the velocity stacks are built in. Everything is welded and EXTREMELY strong. I caught myself leaning on it supporting myself a few times. This thing will not budge at all. I'm not sure I could say that about any other intake manifold.
A shot of the intake manifold by itself.
We would end Day I by picking up some metal to build the hard line for the -16AN bung, removing the old intake manifold, and buying some metal to make new spacers for my fuel rail. Here is a shot of the manifold mounted onto my motor (bone stock motor w/ 2mm headgasket & valvetrain):
It's now 4am and a write up of Day II will be up tomorrow night. This is a neutral write up and NOT a sponsor type post. I will be posting up all positives, negatives, problems and praises from my personal point of view. I hope to give the S2Ki community a write up of what I think of the manifold. Stay tuned!
I don't post up on the FI forum very often, but I haven't seen very many installs or reviews of the AFI Intake Manifold so I thought I would post up the process of my install!
Day I:
First Impression(s):I received intake manifold and all I could say is WOW! The quality is amazing! The differences between the AFI manifold and the OEM manifold are night and day! The plenum is HUGE! I could fit my entire arm through the plenum (I'm skinny though
) The throttle body inlet is roughly 78-79mm. Velocity stacks built into the plenum, each stack is machined to match the runner next to it; unlike the OEM intake manifold where the runners vary in length. Overall, I could not be happier with the quality and it actually far exceeded my expectations. Pricing on the manifold is set to be competitive with other manifolds in the market. I tried to buy the Hypertune manifold from MrSantos a few months back and I'm actually glad that the deal didn't go through (he was unsure of parting out the intake manifold from the motor). While the Hypertune manifold on other cars has proven to make great power. The AFI seems like it would be no different; if not better as the plenum seems to be much larger and build quality is much stronger. I have seen Hypertune manifold easily destroyed by high HP cars. The AFI manifold is welded in any seam that could/would be weak.Intall
I asked Josh @ AFI for the throttle body flange to be machined for a Q45 (90mm) throttle body. Josh had actually asked me which throttle body flange I wanted to go with prior to me sending in payment. I thought that I would be stuck with the sizing for the S2000 (which is rather limited in terms of anything larger than 74mm. My personal preference is cast throttle bodies; they are much less likely to stick and are much smoother to operate. Getting off the line from a stop light is much easier when you have a cast throttle body (in all the throttle bodies that I've ever owned or tried). We did encounter some type of error in the throttle flange machining though. Josh was more than willing to have the flange fixed at no additional cost to me but I am on a time crunch and need the car up and running by this weekend. Josh asked that I send in my throttle body so that they could test out other manifolds flanged for the Q45 throttle body, so there should be no other mix ups in the future!
I ended up ordering a cast aluminum BBK 80mm throttle body from Summit Racing. It was less than $200 and one of the largest offered in cast form for the 88-95 Mustang (5.0) which AFI had machined a 2nd set of holes; AFI can machine you 2 sets of throttle body bolt patterns (i.e. S2000 & Mustang bolt patterns) Summit ships REALLY quickly and the throttle body would arrive on Day II. I also ordered a -16AN 90 degree fitting as well as a -16AN weld bung. AFI provides you with a AN fitting water neck (which is O-ringed and also has a prevision for the stock ECT sensor). I had a mock up motor in which I mounted the intake manifold and tried to create a plan of attack. I will also be installing ID1000's, the new AEM Series II EMS, and retuning everything for the new setup. Here are some of the pictures of the mock up. (These pictures are off of my phone. There are better pics for Day II).
Front view with the 80mm BBK Throttle body (extremely smooth butterfly. I'm actually really happy with the quality of it):
-16AN Fitting w/ the weld on bung attached. We will use a partial hard line for the next month until I tear down the car again to build a V-Mount:
An inside view of the AFI Intake Manifold. As you can see, the velocity stacks are built in. Everything is welded and EXTREMELY strong. I caught myself leaning on it supporting myself a few times. This thing will not budge at all. I'm not sure I could say that about any other intake manifold.
A shot of the intake manifold by itself.
We would end Day I by picking up some metal to build the hard line for the -16AN bung, removing the old intake manifold, and buying some metal to make new spacers for my fuel rail. Here is a shot of the manifold mounted onto my motor (bone stock motor w/ 2mm headgasket & valvetrain):
It's now 4am and a write up of Day II will be up tomorrow night. This is a neutral write up and NOT a sponsor type post. I will be posting up all positives, negatives, problems and praises from my personal point of view. I hope to give the S2Ki community a write up of what I think of the manifold. Stay tuned!
08-05-2010, 03:19 AM
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DAY II
What I though would be a mainly bolt on affair wasn't as much the case. One thing major thing that I didn't find out until today was that the AFI manifold doesn't come with a throttle cable bracket unless you tell them which throttle cable your going to use; along with which throttle body. Since I had indicated that I would be using either a Mustang or Q45 throttle body, no bracket was installed on the manifold...So much of today was spent building one. Luckily I have a friend who is a skilled fabricator and he was able to build me one fairly quickly. Instead of welding on a throttle cable bracket onto the intake manifold itself; I wanted the bracket to be bolted onto the throttle body. This would make it much easier to change later on if I end up going with a different throttle body or throttle cable. Here is what we came up with (NOTE: We positioned the throttle cable so that when the gas peddle is at 100%, the cable would be at a straight line. Because the throttle linkage is D shaped, it has a curved angle to it when the throttle position is at 0):
We also needed to build a IAC block off plate for the throttle body. Since I went with a different throttle body than AFI recommended; I needed to make a few modifications to the throttle body itself. AFI recommends the Accufab RACE throttle body, which removes the IAC as well as the vacuum port on the throttle body. The BBK throttle body also required a new throttle cable plate since the Mustang uses a different type of throttle cable linkage, the BBK came with a nipple on the end of it (another thing I didn't anticipate). So I found a old throttle linkage from a B-series throttle body and took it apart and proceeded to modify it to accept the OEM S2000 type linkage. Here is the final product (which I sprayed wrinkle black).
IAC Block Off:
New Throttle Linkage:
After we had finished the throttle cable bracket, we moved on to finishing up the spacers for the fuel rail. Again, I turned to Brandon (the fabricator) to machine 3 spacers for the fuel rail. It is much cheaper for me to buy $3 worth of metal than to pay hundreds on a bolt on rail. A Inline Pro rail would require no modification to run on the manifold other than using some spacers for the ID1000's (which I may be wrong, however AFI does use their rail coupled with the ID1000's. I believe that the manifold/rail combo wouldn't require any real modifications).
Bad picture of the modified rail mounts:
Again, we ended up working really late and realized that we needed a tap to run back through some of the threads since they seemed to have some slight warpage when they welded the manifold together. This is something that I'm going to let Josh @ AFI know so that he can run the tap through all threaded holes to ensure there is no need to do this in the future. Once again, I'm up way too late and will keep you all informed on the install process. At the moment, with all the unexpected twists and turns, I think I might be 1 day behind (I ended up adding a few more things that I wanted to get done while I have the intake manifold out, so we will probably be done on Saturday, maybe tomorrow night) so stay tuned for more updates!
I forgot that I took a bunch of pictures to compare the differences between the stock intake manifold and the AFI unit:
AFI Intake Manifold Throttle Body Inlet:
OEM AP1 Intake Manifold:
AFI Intake Manifold Runner: 54.5mm OEM AP1 Intake Runner: 51.7mm
(Measured at where the intake manifold meets the head)
AFI Intake Manifold Plenum:
OEM Intake Manifold Plenum (hard to get any good pictures because the OEM Velocity stack on the #1 runner comes up so high):
AFI vs. OEM Side by Side Shots;
AFI Intake Manifold w/ O-rings removed:
What I though would be a mainly bolt on affair wasn't as much the case. One thing major thing that I didn't find out until today was that the AFI manifold doesn't come with a throttle cable bracket unless you tell them which throttle cable your going to use; along with which throttle body. Since I had indicated that I would be using either a Mustang or Q45 throttle body, no bracket was installed on the manifold...So much of today was spent building one. Luckily I have a friend who is a skilled fabricator and he was able to build me one fairly quickly. Instead of welding on a throttle cable bracket onto the intake manifold itself; I wanted the bracket to be bolted onto the throttle body. This would make it much easier to change later on if I end up going with a different throttle body or throttle cable. Here is what we came up with (NOTE: We positioned the throttle cable so that when the gas peddle is at 100%, the cable would be at a straight line. Because the throttle linkage is D shaped, it has a curved angle to it when the throttle position is at 0):
We also needed to build a IAC block off plate for the throttle body. Since I went with a different throttle body than AFI recommended; I needed to make a few modifications to the throttle body itself. AFI recommends the Accufab RACE throttle body, which removes the IAC as well as the vacuum port on the throttle body. The BBK throttle body also required a new throttle cable plate since the Mustang uses a different type of throttle cable linkage, the BBK came with a nipple on the end of it (another thing I didn't anticipate). So I found a old throttle linkage from a B-series throttle body and took it apart and proceeded to modify it to accept the OEM S2000 type linkage. Here is the final product (which I sprayed wrinkle black).
IAC Block Off:
New Throttle Linkage:
After we had finished the throttle cable bracket, we moved on to finishing up the spacers for the fuel rail. Again, I turned to Brandon (the fabricator) to machine 3 spacers for the fuel rail. It is much cheaper for me to buy $3 worth of metal than to pay hundreds on a bolt on rail. A Inline Pro rail would require no modification to run on the manifold other than using some spacers for the ID1000's (which I may be wrong, however AFI does use their rail coupled with the ID1000's. I believe that the manifold/rail combo wouldn't require any real modifications).
Bad picture of the modified rail mounts:
Again, we ended up working really late and realized that we needed a tap to run back through some of the threads since they seemed to have some slight warpage when they welded the manifold together. This is something that I'm going to let Josh @ AFI know so that he can run the tap through all threaded holes to ensure there is no need to do this in the future. Once again, I'm up way too late and will keep you all informed on the install process. At the moment, with all the unexpected twists and turns, I think I might be 1 day behind (I ended up adding a few more things that I wanted to get done while I have the intake manifold out, so we will probably be done on Saturday, maybe tomorrow night) so stay tuned for more updates!
I forgot that I took a bunch of pictures to compare the differences between the stock intake manifold and the AFI unit:
AFI Intake Manifold Throttle Body Inlet:
OEM AP1 Intake Manifold:
AFI Intake Manifold Runner: 54.5mm OEM AP1 Intake Runner: 51.7mm
(Measured at where the intake manifold meets the head)
AFI Intake Manifold Plenum:
OEM Intake Manifold Plenum (hard to get any good pictures because the OEM Velocity stack on the #1 runner comes up so high):
AFI vs. OEM Side by Side Shots;
AFI Intake Manifold w/ O-rings removed:
