So hopefully by looking at the pictures it will become obvious very quickly that this isn’t our final airbox design. This airbox is for one reason and one reason only and that is to allow us to be able to start, run and give a basic tune to the FZ12’s beating V12 heart.
Lets call the design functional shall we, because it certainly isn’t pretty. We aren’t able to settle on a final design for the proper airbox yet since we don’t have a roofline in place and we can’t do that until we’ve finalised the chassis and we can’t do that until the LVVTA come and ……….well you get the picture.
Zac as always provided the knowledge and equipment when it comes to anything composite we have to do, and we shaped a block of polystyrene. Then I wrapped the polystyrene in tape and then Zac fibreglassed over that to give us a basic shape. Once we had the shape we simply removed the polystyrene from the bottom leaving a hollow shell. Once we had the basic shell it wasn’t any trouble at all to glue some flat sheet to the top where we planned on bolting the throttle bodies.
This was the end result. As I said, she’s no looker, but will do until we can finalise a design when we’ll be making something much nicer out of carbon.
I had to drill and tap holes for the air intake temp sensor, MAP (manifold air pressure) sensor and a vacuum line to go to the fuel pressure regulator, but that was all really easy.
Next I needed to drill and tap the many holes along the bottom to allow me to bolt the main manifold plate to the bottom of the airbox to make an air tight seal. You might remember that Mitch from O.L.S helped us a while back to laser cut a seal out of neoprene material and it worked perfectly.
Next was the very fiddly process of lining up all 12 intake tubes and tightening up all of the clamps. This takes approx 1 hour to do from start to finish, so when I say fiddly, I mean it.
But as always seems to be the case with this stuff, you never seem to care about time or anything else once you’re done and you can see it all together and I’m super happy to know now that this is the last mechanical part we need to start this engine !
I suspect Chris from Prestige Tuning and I will be spending quite a bit of time together in the near future to get this thing fired up and given a basic tune.
I will cover this off in the next episode and let you know how it goes !
Please feel free to comment or ask questions, I really love sharing and discussing our build and cars in general with other readers.
There’s a newer entry in this story, please click here – FZ12 – Part 33
If you’ve missed the last part of our story then click here FZ12 – Part 31
or if you want to go right to the beginning then click here FZ12 – Part 1