Magnus Sheet Metal Intake Manifold Install

Intro

This is a guide to help you with your intake manifold install. It is done on my 98 Talon with a 7bolt however the process will be much the same on a 6bolt, just a slightly different manifold. Also installed is a 1G throttle body and all emissions equipment was deleted.

Before we get to it I would like to give a "thank you" to Sean Greene at HCI magazine for printing this in the magazine early 2004. Also thanks to Marco at Magnus Motorsports for manifold to install and review.

Difficulty: Advanced
Time: 15 Hours (3 five hour sessions for myself, I’m a slow careful worker the first time I do a job)
Reward: Huge!
Beer: One 24 will suffice.

Things you will need:

You will need all your standard tools for this, however a few extras will help like:

Small Welder to adjust your intercooler pipe
Chop saw for cutting your upper intercooler pipe shorter / angles
Grinder to shave things down, clean up edges
Dremel with lots of bits
Smaller battery like on from a Civic (we can now thank Honda for something…)

Preface:

Here is what the manifold looks like. It is said to yield a 40-60hp increase over a stock manifold. I have yet to dyno or really try my car out, however everybody that uses it reports amazing results. I did drive it directly after the install and noticed a large top end increase from 5500rpm onwards and no negative effects below 5500rpm. Transient boost response was completely normal and felt just like my car did with the stock manifold.

Visually the Magnus intake is very nice, Marco said “Make it bling and they will love it” and he was right, it just looks great under the hood. It is a huge improvement cosmetically over the stock intake manifold.

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Few things you should know before starting:

The manifold moves your throttle body around quite a bit so you will have to adjust your upper intercooler pipe so that it fits. Generally I noticed the throttle body was closer to the drivers side of the car by 2”and lower by 2”. The stock intake manifold is a bit of a pain to get off so take your time and don’t get frustrated. Once the stock manifold is off all the hard work is done. After that it’s all the fun stuff. I found doing the install in stages really helped me out. Do the hard part first, then walk away and come back for the fun stuff when you mind is clear. This really helped me keep from scratching things I didn’t want to scratch because I was upset.

Ok here we go… IMAGES ARE ABOVE CORROSPONDING TEXT


This is how the engine bay looks before you start anything. Always a good idea to take a before picture so you can admire all your hard work afterwards.

You can start by getting the obvious stuff out of the way like your strut bar and battery. It is a good idea at this point to have a few boxes or cans laying around for you to put bolts into. I have a part tray that has lots of separate little spots in it for different bolts. This was a great way for me to separate bolts from different steps.

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Loosen off your bolts holding on your upper intercooler pipe. Your throttle body is held on with two bolts and two studs with nuts on the ends. This helps to align everything before you tighten it down afterwards. Pull the upper intercooler pipe out of the engine bay because you will to have to make some modifications to it before it will fit back in.

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Take the throttle cable off the throttle body and lay it to the side we will do more with that shortly.

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Unclip all the electrical components (remembering what goes where) from the injectors, coil pack, igniter etc etc.. Everything that is associated with the wiring harness that goes around the intake manifold.

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Unbolt your fuel rail and injectors and lay them to the side. My return was long enough I could just lay it over to the side of the car with no problems. Pull you injectors out and keep them some place safe. If your putting on a Magnus intake, chances are you have aftermarket injectors and you don’t want them dropping all over the place.

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Remove the coil pack and igniter from intake manifold. We will have to find other spots for these afterwards as they will not bolt down to the Magnus intake anymore. Set these aside as you will need to do some modification to them for re-installation

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With everything unplugged you should be able to pull the wiring harness to the side. Don’t forget the knock sensor which is clipped just under the intake manifold. This way you can pull the harness over and move it completely out of your way. Make the next few steps much easier. This process was very simple, so don’t try and work around the harness because you don’t want to move it. It will cause you a lot of headache later on.

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Using the double nut procedure you can take the studs out of the manifold. This is using two of the nuts locked together on one stud so you can use them to take the stud out of the manifold. You won’t be able to pull the manifold and throttle body out in one piece. At least I found it much easier to remove the throttle body first. You will want to disconnect all the vacuum lines on the top of your throttle body and the coolant lines on the bottom. Once that is done you can easily slip the throttle body off. Make sure you plug the coolant lines with something to minimize the coolant that spills out. I lost very little in the whole process.

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Here is the 1G throttle body (left) vs. the 2G throttle body (right). You can see the obvious benefit of going to a 60mm throttle body from the 52mm found on a 2G.

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[DSMJim]

Remove the final bolts holding the intake manifold on and it should come off fairly easily. There is a bracket bracing the bottom of the manifold to the block, factory overkill. You will need to remove this as well to get the manifold off.

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Here you can see the difference between the stock manifold and the Magnus unit. Short runners and large plenum = big HP gains.

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Generally as a rule of thumb I always replace all the gaskets. Install a new intake manifold gasket before putting on the new intake manifold.

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You will need to install your vacuum fittings on the bottom of the manifold. It takes 3 1/8th NTP fittings and one ¼ NTP fitting. The 3 fitting will be for your FPR, BOV and Boost Gauge. The large fitting is for your brake booster. I used a 90deg elbow for the ¼ fitting as well so the brake booster like was not looped around under the manifold, it just made for a cleaner install.

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Carefully install your new manifold as to not scratch it. You don’t want to go ruining your new manifold just because you’re in a rush to install it, you’ll regret that later on. Put on a few bolts to make sure it doesn’t move while you fit the rest of your parts back around it.

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You will want to move your FIAV (Fast Idle Air Valve) and TPS from your 2G throttle body over to the 1G. Moving the FAIV is not mandatory however I found the lines fit better on it, and it was cleaner. The TPS must be moved over because it’s a 4 prong vs. the 3 prong from a 1G. Follow the manuals re-calibration procedure for your TPS on the new throttle body. It’s easy and you can find the procedure broken down on many websites so I won’t cover it here.

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Install your new 1G throttle body and 1G gasket on your manifold. You will need to move your cruise control box up a hair or two so that it clears the throttle body. You need only screw the two studs in finger tight as they will get tightened in when you finish everything. Here you can see how tight the throttle body is to the throttle cable box. You will want to hook your coolant lines back up to the FIAV. If you decide not to hook up the FIAV that’s up to you. I have read reports of some people saying its ok, others reported idle surge and other problems. I figured what the hell, lets hook it up so I get better cold starts. I don’t winter drive my car, however October and early November it starts to get cold and the car wouldn’t want to start without those items attached. Do a search here on DSMTuners on FIAV and read some opinions from different people around the country. You will also want to plug up the 4 vacuum ports on the top of the throttle body as you won’t be using them. At the time I didn’t have any of those nice caps so I just looped vacuum line from one to the other. It worked for the time being until I could get my hands on something better.

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Next you will have to start finding homes for a few different items. The igniter is the first one I did since it looked to be the easiest. The bracket holding it down to the stock intake manifold was large enough for it to get bolted down under an intake manifold bolt. Your igniter needs a descent ground so you don’t want to leave it hanging under the manifold. This was easy and keeps it hidden with no wiring modification.

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At this point it’s a good idea to tighten up the bolts for the intake manifold as you will not need to move it around anymore and other items will get installed in the way so, tighten it all down now. This is also a good time to hook up your vacuum lines. As stated a few steps ago you will only be using a few vacuum lines under the hood now.

You have three 1/8th NTP fittings for your boost gauge, FPR and BOV. All the vacuum fitting for your turbo and boost controller can run from the BOV feed like normal. The one larger fitting with the ¼ NTP fitting is for your brake booster. I had to trim the brake booster line to make it a little more manageable. Make sure you don’t cut the check (one way) valve which is inside the line. It keeps boost from pressurizing the brake booster and making your brakes rock hard. Make sure you use clamps or zip ties on your fitting to make sure they seal and will not pop off with 20+ psi of pressure in the manifold.

You probably now have a whole lot of extra vacuum lines sitting around doing nothing now right? Great pull them all out. You can remove all the vac lines and the pipes, and charcoal canister and all that related emissions garbage. Your car will pass emissions without that crap anyways (California people need not apply here as you will fail visual). What you will need to do is keep the solenoids connected and hidden under the manifold somewhere. I opted to remove them from their original location on the firewall so they didn’t look “unplugged” and zip tied them under the manifold so they were still there just hidden. If you don’t keep the solenoids connected you run the risk of a check engine light.

You can decide weather to keep or remove the solenoid for your FPR now. If you keep decide to keep it, it will help your car warm up as it holds your fuel pressure higher during warm up until it allows more vacuum though to drop the pressure down. It doesn’t hurt anything so I decided to keep it for drivability and quicker warms ups.

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Time to install your fuel rail and injectors. Take your injectors out of your safe spot, lube up the o-rings and re-install them into the rail and screw the rail back down.. Don’t forget your plastic spacers for the fuel rail and the throttle cable. You can also hook the throttle cable back up to your throttle body now.

Now is also the time to grab your wiring harness and move it over and start plugging things in. Your igniter will plug right in no problem as will your injectors and tps, etc etc... You can easily hide your wiring harness under your fuel rail there is plenty of room. A few zip ties help keep it in place and from moving around with the vibration of the engine. The only thing that you won’t be able to connect will be your coil pack as it will end up sitting too far away now to reach the wiring harness. You can also hook your fuel feed back up to your fuel rail.

I didn’t want to use a small filter for my PCV and valve cover vent so I ran some low pressure fuel line and T’d the lines together and ran it behind the motor so it looks like it’s going somewhere. It only drips a few drops of oil when you’re under boost so there is no worry of making a mess under the car or on your driveway. If your motor is running properly, very little should ever come out of it so there is no need for a filter or anything like that.

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[DSMJim]

To create the extra length needed for the coil pack to be re-located I added some extra length to the wires. Figuring it would be easier to buy a new coil pack down the road if I ever had to go back or had a problem I opted to alter the wiring on the coil pack, not the wiring harness on the car. Make sure that you use the same or better gauge wire of equal or better strands of copper for the best electrical connection. Also make absolutely sure that you solder all your connections for a trouble free connection and tape it up very well. Lots of voltage runs though this and you want to make sure its not going to be a problem with heat or moisture. Make sure you don’t mix up the wires either. As dumb as that sounds it would be very easy to mix up the two blue wires, so only cut and lengthen one wire at a time just to be sure.

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Time to find a new home for your coil pack. You will need to mount it somewhere where it’s away from heat, moisture and not too close to anything that could move and damage it. Many people opt to mount it to the firewall directly behind the intake manifold however I decided to be different and find a new location for it. I didn’t want to have to buy new plug wires as my Mangacore wires have been good and are fairly new so I didn’t feel the need to replace them.

I cut the bottom of the coil pack so it was just a square holding the coils in place and the bracket was flat so it could be screwed down flat. I moved iy between the strut tower housing and the brake master cylinder. Two screws were used to hold it down on the strut tower housing and a simple bracket underneath the opposite side held it down nicely. I particularly like this spot because your regular plug wires reach, it’s out of the way, and keeps any additional wiring from running over top of the manifold. There is also nothing really important in that spot so you’re not blocking anything important off. You should be able to plug your wiring harness back in and hook up your spark plug wires.

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Now its time to install your new battery. The Magnus manifold moves your throttle body around a bit so you will need to get a smaller battery for the extra room. It gave me a precious few extra inches I needed under the hood to comfortably make my intercooler pipe fit. It will need to be modified, however not by much with the extra room you will gain with the smaller battery. I also have a MSD DIS-2 and have always found the end of the battery a great place to slide it in. It’s out of the way and the dip switches are still easily accessible for a quick change.

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It’s now time to modify your upper intercooler pipe. The new manifold is much lower so you will need to swivel the flange on the end of your pipe about 30deg. I used my Dremel to cut the existing welds to separate the flange and pipe so I could make the necessary adjustments. The other end of the pipe needed to have about 2” trimmed off it because the manifold is now 2” closer to that side of the car. After making my cuts I put the flange on the throttle body, held up the pipe to make sure it would clear everything and both ends would reach with out binding or any other problems. I put a small tack weld on the flange side to make it hold in place with my crappy home welder. If you don’t have a small welder (you should buy one) marking the pipes with a marker and having a local welding shop weld it up will work too. You have some forgiveness with the silicone on the other end so it’s somewhat critical to get it right. If it moves a tiny bit your pipe should still line up. If you do have problems a “hump” hose will give you the extra movement needed for everything to fit together. After making sure it lined up good I pulled the pipe out and had it welded all the way around.

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Congratulations you’re done! That’s a successful install. Stand back and admire your work.

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Feel free to PM me if you a question or if you feel I have forgotten a step.

 

[DSMJim]

It was pointed out to me that I never mentioned about the MAP sensor thats on the very top of the stock manifold. (thanks 44pirate )

The map sensor is only used (from what i'm told) if your maf fails and your car goes into limp home mode. It runs on a sort of speed density system so you could at least get home and not be left stranded. You can just leave it hanging behind your manifold with no ill effects. Just make sure it's pluged in or you may get a CE code.

If you really want you could hook up a vac line from your throttle body (since your not using those anymore) and hook it up to the map sensor. I didn't bother because I really don't care that much, so I didn't hook it up.

 

[DSMJim]

Another update kids...

Before manifold 12.55 @ 109mph
http://www.etdracing.com/jim/magnus/1259.jpg

After manifold 12.13.@ 113mph
http://www.etdracing.com/jim/magnus/1213.jpg

Thats a solid 4/10ths and 4mph gain in the 1/4 mile. No other changes were performed on my car from before the manifold to afterwards.