What I decided to do was route the inlet pipes over to the passenger side of the engine bay (wish my turbo inlet was facing the other way!) and built a box to place the air filter into.

The airbox is meant to isolate the air filter from the heat in the engine bay (wood is a fairly decent insulator, compared to the metal I could have made the box out of). You may have noticed here on the left, there’s a nice large opening behind the headlight, it’ll flow more than enough air for the airfilter.

Next up, I needed to make the wood waterproof. I definitely drive this van in the rain. I made this box out of “hardboard” which is almost as bad as particle board when it comes to falling apart when it gets wet. So I simply spread a nice thin coat of fiberglass resin all over it. Lacquer would have been better, but I didn’t have any handy.

While I had the pipes all apart, I decided to finally install the crankcase vent tube. Generally, this is supposed to be just a fresh air inlet into the crankcase. Under boost the PCV valve is shut, so blowby from the engine will come out of this spot on the valve cover. So I have it hooked to the filtered and unpressurized side of my intake. There may even be slight vacuum in that inlet hose to help pull the vapors out of the crankcase.

This is a bit of a zoom-in on the picture above. See that big sensor sticking out the end of the head? That’s the van’s original oil pressure sender. It sends the oil pressure signal to the factory gauge in the instrument cluster. It seems to read perfectly fine when installed into the side of the head like this. It’s nice to have all of the factory gauges working.

Last week, I had one very bad day. The factory original spark plug wires that I had swapped over from the Omni, that I had found at the junkyard 3 years and 30k miles ago decided to die on me. I had just started my workday, so I ended up having to limp my van around on 3 cylinders for the next hundred miles, wondering if it was the headgasket, or a stuck valve, or what.

When I got home, I figured I’d start with the simplest thing, and swapped on another set of junkyard/factory original plug wires. Viola, it was purring like a kitten again. Actually was running better than it ever had. haha.. So I decided to bite the bullet and order up some NEW plug wires for a change. These are NGK wires. I got a fresh set of NGK V-Power spark plugs while I was at it, I’ve always had excellent luck with those plugs in the past. The van is running excellent with the fresh ignition system tuneup.

So this is how it ended up. I used some adhesive backed foam pads to seal up the edges around the box. Hopefully they’ll help keep the box in place as well. I didn’t have any brackets to secure the box down with, that would have been a good idea.

I haven’t driven the van with the new intake yet, I’ll do that tomorrow, hopefully this finally gets my intake temps back down below 100.


As for how the van is doing otherwise. It’s doing great, just about 3,000 miles on the new motor now. Just did the first real oil change. Not a drop of oil under the motor, all the seals are sealing perfectly.

I’ve logged my gas mileage from the first full tank I put in it, to the last full tank I put in it (this tank is just about empty, but not counted yet). 2,104 miles, I used 80.759 gallons to travel that distance. That works out to an average of just over 26mpg. Definitely an improvement over the 25mpg the old motor averaged. Not a huge improvement, but I needed a new motor anyways, so this is just a win-win situation.