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Old 01-10-2010, 10:44 PM   #1 (permalink)
wdb
lurker's apprentice
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: the Perimeter
Posts: 942

PlainJane - '12 Toyota Tacoma Base 4WD Access Cab
90 day: 20.98 mpg (US)
Thanks: 504
Thanked 226 Times in 173 Posts
It's been darn cold here... (cai delete + grille block)

...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.

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