Smoothing out the upper intake plenum, page 2.
Clean it to remove all debris
Well no secret here. Just clean all that damn dust out, actually you should do that alot during the course of the sanding.
Port match it to the T/B and blower intake
Porting it to the T/B and blower. First of I'm still running a stock T/B, so looking at it there wasn't enough material to really remove to make a difference. If I had an oval T/B I could see matching it up perfectly. But the stock one, it matched okay just not enough for me to actually do work to it.
The blower was a different story. First what I did was shove a rag in the intake of blower to help out incase the ink gets all over. I then placed black ink around the intake hole on the blower. Then bolted the intake plenum onto it. Since it was late at night I just went to bed and removed the plenum in the morning. I forgot to snap some pics of the blower with ink on it, or the plenum after it dried. So I started grinding away. Here's two pics of it:
| |
|
If you closely in those 2 pictures you will see the dryed ink in an oval shape. Thats the size of the opening on the blower intake. The point of porting is to remove all the material up to that ink. And as you can see thats where I started grinding away to. First I used a sanding grinding wheel. When I got reasonably close I took over with the 80 grit flapwheel and grinded away. Again when I got combfortably close I switched to the 120 grit flapwheel. When I got done using that it was on the the wet sanding, followed by a polishing wheel and this was my endresult:
 |
 |
Another way that you could port if you don't want to use the ink is to use the gasket. I would have prefered to use the gasket method, but that involves more work then I was ready to get into. For this method what you do is use the gasket as marking of what materials to grind away. This however has do be done to both peices that you are porting together to match, in this case it would have been the intake plenum and the blower intake. I didn't feel like taking the blower off to do this. Maybe over the winter I'll give this method a shot.
TIP: When grinding down for the blower intake, I'd recommend not porting it to the exact size of the blower intake, make the intake plenum slightly larger. This deals with two issues, 1) you'd don't have to worry about the blower intake being slightly larger which could create an air dam. 2) If you pay close attention you will notice that when you bolt the intake plenum on, there is about 1 cm of play that you could wiggle it (intake plenum) around. If the intake plenum is slightly smaller it also helps when putting it back on, so even if you do happen to place it on 1 cm off, you're still slightly covered.
Wet sand it by hand with 300 grit sandpaper and a quick polish to get it smoother
Well this is straight forward. I threw some water in the intake, grabbed 240 grit sandpaper and acted like my hand was having a violent shaking episode. After about 20 minutes of that I cleaned the blower intake, and instead of drying it off, I just stepped up and used 320 grit paper. After another 20 minutes I washed the intake off again. Let me say WOW what a difference that made. It started to look shiny and was very smooth, even though it still had alot of dimples.Here are some pics:
 |
 |
 |
Well after this I started getting excited that I was almost done. So I whipped out the dremel again with the buffing wheel, some buffing compound and went to work. The end result, more shiney, more smooth and the satisfaction of know that I'm done for now. WAHOOOOO!!!!!!! And of course, the *how does it look finish??* pictures:
 |
 |
 |
Impressions.
Haha, the intake is on the truck started up, but unfortunatly the rain came out and the truck stayed in the garage. Another day to give it a wirl.
I have to say whether or not the this makes a "seat-of-the-pants" performance gain or not, I still think it was a worth while mod to do. I learned how and got some practice and doing porting and polishing, which I had previously never done before. The intake looks alot better then before and does feel so much more smoother. Also, since I had all the tools already doing this saved me money to put towards other mods. Plus I learned that there is oil in the supercharger, which I wonder if any of that makes it through the lower intake, into the heads and is was causes some oil to burned after the truck has been sitting for a while and then is started up.
So if you can afford to have you truck on some down time, give this a whirl, whats the worse you do, have to buy a new intake plenum? big deal.