Talk Morgan Forums Community General Photo Gallery The Elephants Trunk

Some of you may remember my previous posts about air filter housings, hoses and various other bits and pieces- especially the issue of water ingress onto the plugs on a Zetec E 4/4. Herewith some pics of work so far.

We haven’t changed the air filter housing as yet, but have replaced the element with an ITG ProFilter which has sorted the power out a bit.
Also, as you can see, I’ve replaced the standard, black metal radiator expansion tank with an alloy, Peter Mulberry one which I’ve polished. I’ve also used Aeroquip braided hose to go between the expansion tank and the rad.

You can see the alloy cam cover insert and also stainless steel cam belt cover and heat shield ( last two items from Pro-Alloy)
So, not the finished article yet, but getting there.

Are you going to repostion the air intake to above the rad?

No. All the information I have ( including a long chat to the guys at ITG) suggests that what I need to be looking at is to SHORTEN the distance between the air duct pipe intake and the air filter housing as much as possible. They're talking in terms of an absolute maximum of 800mm and shorter if possible. Otherwise, the duct itself creates turbulence and there can be a power drop of. The current length of the air duct pipe is also the reason we haven't fitted a bell mouth- it's too near the water rail.

So present plan is to find some way of using the existing air filter housing position and a closed induction unit but with a much shorter duct. At the same time though, I want to have the intake somewhere where it takes in cool air, so we're still looking at this one

Cheers

I can imagine DaveW getting all misty eyed over these photos.

For my part, the workings of an engine are akin to the black arts, so for us non-engineering heathens, are you hoping to: improve performance, reliability and decrease water ingress - one of the above or all?

This could almost be my alter-ego eh Simon????????
Red car as well...........

Simon,
Dave W's seen em- I don't know about the state of his tear ducts but he thought they were OK.

As to the 'hopes'- a bit of all three really.

Certainly it'spossible to get a heck of a lot more out of a Zetec engine without changing it from a nice road car to a howling track machine with a very narrow power band, so I'm hoping that the induction side mods -, together with what we've already done to the exhaust- will achieve that without sacrificing reliability

In fact, I'd hope that some of the things, such as the Magnecors plug leads, repalcing hose with the braided stuff etc would actually help with this

The water ingress thing is also a combination - It was a pain when it happened ( almost total loss of power in the outside lane of the N138) but I must confess I also like the look of what we've done

I'm also something of an engineering heathen I suspect- the classic 'knows just enough to be dangerous.' I'm just lucky that I have nephew who is not only an automotive engineer but has also decided that 'that funny old car my uncle bought' is actually bl*!dy marvellous, so he works on it every chance he gets!

Cheers.

PS I'm also lucky in that I use Mike and Ben Duncan's services and they put my half -baked ideas into some practical form

Wonder if you can post a picture of the polished expansion tank? I think I'd expect to see it behind the air-filter housing on top of the bulkhead, but no sign of it there....

cheers, Colin

Colin,
I've posted a couple of pics showing the bottle in the photo gallery under the heading 'Polished Expansion Tank Bottle'

Cheers