...and my Honda Fit doesn't much like it.
It doesn't do anything particularly bad; it just takes a very long time to warm up, and the gas mileage turns to poo. So I decided to try ridding the car of its factory CAI and adding a grille block, in the hopes of improving both at least a little bit.
Under the hood, I pulled the rubber accordion thingie off the air cleaner inlet, disconnected the other end from the inner fender, and removed it from the car. Then I plugged up the hole in the inner fender where the cold air comes in. No big deal.
Next I fashioned a lower grille block out of plexiglas and tiewrapped it in place. Pretty simple! It's a straight-up rectangle, easy as pie to measure and cut. I even used a $1 castoff piece of plexi from the local hardware store. I was starting to feel very, errr, ecomodder-ish.
I went for a little drive, and lo and behold the car warmed up noticeably faster. Yay! But my joy was shortlived.
Intake air temps were up too, but only about 5 deg F. Boo. I guess I'll have to go back to the hardware store and get some tubing to pull air from the backside of the engine.
The next day I went for a longer drive. Immediately upon getting up to freeway speed the water temperature ran straight up to 215+ deg F and the electric fans came on. The temp dropped, the fans turned off, and the cycle repeated. Double boo! I pulled over, snipped the tiewraps, and removed the grille block. Temps returned to reasonable levels.
Looks I need to make some holes in the grille block. No big deal, I have a bunch of hole saws and whatnot from various projects. As I started to make the first hole, the pilot drill bit snagged on its way out of the plexi and shattered it into 3 pieces. Triple boo.
Sigh. It seems like most stuff I touch lately gets worse instead of better.
Maybe I should sit in a chair, watch TV, drink Dogfish Head stout, and wait until my
biorhythms get out of their funk.