There are a couple of other threads going on concerning these right now, but this thread is more about the experience of installing the spacers on my 2001 Infiniti I30. I recently got my car dyno tuned and the numbers really sucked, I had lent out my car for a while and when I got it back I thought it was hella slow but thought I had imagined it. After posting the dyno numbers however, I was told that it could be my knock sensor, and sure enough i had the P0325 code. I didn't notice it since it doesn't trigger a CEL. Since you gotta remove the IM to get to the knock sensor and the OEM gaskets are way expensive (30bucks a piece) I thought I might as well install the NWP spacers. I ordered them and got them really quickly. I also ordered a Knock sensor from Nissanpartswholesale.com for $70.

Friday around 10am I started the installation. I tried to leave as many vacuum hoses connected as possible, since I didn't feel like labeling them and from what I have seen the 5th gen engine bay compared to the 5.5 looks like cable salad. It took me a while to get the UIM support brackets off that are close to the firewall. There is so little space there that my ratchet didn't fit and it's a 12mm nut. The wrench I had was really short so I just took a bigger one and connected it and finally got all those brackets off and I finally got the UIM off. The LIM didn't cause any problems and I was about to replace the knock sensor.

Turns out NissanPartsWholesale had sent me the wrong one!!!!
They sent me one for a 240sx. I called in and for half an hour that guy tried to argue with me saying they are interchangeable. I told him they are not because the connectors were completely different and still he tried to argue. I mean come on i'm not a f*cking retard (emphasis on the second syllable). He then offered to refund me the money after I sent it back in and connected me to a parts guy again. I asked whether they would overnight it for me and they said OF COURSE! at my cost that is...

Soooooo I hung up on the guy and called the local dealership where I used to work and still get employee discount and picked up an oem one for $140 bucks. Came back home and put everything back together. I finished up when it was dark, started the car and.... nothing. The car would stutter a little bit and then die. I had to work Saturday and Sunday was Easter so I took it all back apart today and noticed a couple of things.

Right in the elbow of the UIM there is a hole in the bottom right behind the throttle body. No idea what it is for, since it just rests on the support bracket, maybe the 00 has something there. Now since the UIM spacer lifts the entire IM a little up, that hole was open sucking in a bunch of unmetered air causing this problem. Also the Extended bolts that Aaron provided with his kit cut into the plastic manifold and pushed the internal rod down, i circumvented that by buying a couple bigger washers and that worked fine then. Also I have no idea why he provides a TB coolant bypass for all the other kits but not for the 2001, so I just went out and bought one for 2 bucks at the local hardware store.

To make the entire thing work tho I had to take the elbow support bracket off, I took a grinder and cut the flat part that seals of the whole in the elbow off and then just bolted it directly onto the UIM. Put everything back together and works fantastic now. I can feel a huge performance gain from before but that's mainly due to the replaced knock sensor. I'm getting it retuned again next week and we'll see how big of a difference the knock sensor really makes!

 

beautiful car!

 

In for numbers.

 

Yeah, I think that aaron and his spacers are awesome on vq35 and usim vq30, but I cant see me dropping $200 without a dyno sheet to back up the technology on the dek. Hope someone can post a b4 and after

 

well in my case it was either dropping 90 bucks on gaskets or an additional 110 bucks for some performance, a lower exhaust note and to support a fellow .orger.

also there are lower intake manifold spacers. The stock ones are out of metal and transfer all the heat from the block straight to the LIM. The spacers hinder that heat transfer somewhat.

 

Points well taken, did you notice any commentable gains compared to the car prior to the ks failure?

 

The cheap skate you lent your car to used 87 octane and knocked it silly and killed it. Please, make them pay for the KS

 

make a difference dont wait for a difference...

 

you don't even know, was a way longer story. I picked up a 95 240, planned on selling the I to that B1tch and build the 240. Her car got stolen and she was a coworker so I felt bad for her and she said her husband would buy her my car and she just needed to wait till the end of the month. I let her use my car and she said she'd pay me weekly until the end of the month,. Well in that time she managed to make the wheel fall off on the highway and total out another car and drove my car around on the rotor lol. Not needing to say she didn't wanna buy it anymore... I was pretty impressed with Nissan's quality of stuff tho, the only thing i needed to replace was the rotor... everything else was still perfect. Except the tow-truck driver cracked my bodykit. Oh well... I made her pay 950 bucks for it and it cost me like 35 =)

 

It seems to take a little longer to start now after the fix/nwp installation. Anyone else notice that?

 

How long would you say the install took? Im planning a day for mine but looking at the houses gives me nightmares lol

 

to be completly honest, i can almost guarantee that the spacer will have little to no noticeable differnce on the DE-K motors.
i mean, cmon; i can rest my hand on top of my DE-K manifold whenever i want, no matter how long of a drive i put on the car.
now those VQ35's?
at the last maxima meet i attended, i wanted to feel how hot those manifolds get and boy are those things on fire!!!
not to mention the VK45DE in my M (a VQ with just 2 more cylinders) and you'll be lucky to get your hand back without 3rd degree burns after touching the manifold!
speaking of the VK's, thats a manifold i really wish Aaron would develop a spacer for!

 

Didn't the vk come in the fx45s? My pops got one.. No joke about them suckers lighting your hand up!

 

shhhhh...

 

Hear alot of good stuff about these and wonder do you feel the power allacross the board or low,mid, or at topend?

 

The gains won't be from reducing heat but because the spacers increase the runner length and therefore intake velocities. Most of the gains would be in the midrange.

 

of course it will bud! especially with todays cars equipped with air intake temp sensors, maf, knock sensor etc.
cooler air = more dense charge = more violent explosion = more HP. runner lengths do help, don't get me wrong, but in the end, heat is an engines worst enemy. i've personally seen/witnessed/owned vehicles in the past that benefitted from cooler temps. its the reason i used to put ice packs on my SS before a run down the 1/4 , or boosted cobra's will sometimes run a small 25shot of N20 down the manifold to chill the intake air temp which can reach 150 to 170 degrees.
haven't you ever questioned why Aaron bothered to put Manifold temp results at the bottom part of his website? he did that to show that the dyno pulls done were not on a car "barely started" like other performance shops will do to get the best reuslts, but on a car that 8 dyno runs and allowing the car to sit at idle for 30 minutes to build up as much upper intake manifold heat soak as possible. (italic and underline is from Aaron's website).
im currently trying to get him to design one for the VK and i have a thread started on the M45 forums so that i can build up enough interest so that he can design one for my "other" baby.

 

wow

 

The 5th gen cars have plastic intakes that don't heat soak nearly as much as the aluminum ones on the 5.5 gens so the gains from reducing heat won't be nearly as much as they would otherwise. The primary gains will be from the lengthening effect the spacers give the runners. That's why the gains are about half on a 5th gen as a 5.5 gen.

 

i want to agree with you bud, but keeping manifold temps down have been around before the DE-k and VQ35 motors to say the least. this isnt new a new discovery (maybe you've never owned a FI car before ) , but lower manifold temps help keep "detonation" down to a minimum. especially on high compression motors.
i would like to give you a full lecture explaining the vital importance of air temp and fuel ratio that was given to me when i built my first Procharged stang , but something tells me that you'll come back saying that "lenghthening the runners give more HP, not lower temp" , so i guess ill just end the thread here.

 

Are you guys arguing just for the sake of arguing?!

BOTH of you have established that the DE-K manifold is out of plastic and does NOT suffer from heat soak. Yet there are dyno proven gains! HOw so? Must be the intake runner length.

QUOTE 5 LTR BEATR:
runner lengths do help, don't get me wrong

Obviously the gains aren't from reducing the heat transfer. Where did Scottwax ever claim that lower temperatures don't give more power? Only a re-tard would disagree with that. However there IS NO lower temp on the DEK but still a gain. I mean how many times can you go in circles reiterating the same freaking points?

Also to the "of course it will, bud" quote, the phenolic resin used in the intake spacers or the plastic of the manifold itself have about the same heat transfer qualities. So just adding another piece of plastic in between Metal-> plastic spacer -> plastic manifold doesn't inhibit the heat soaking whatsoever. On the other gens it's metal-> plastic spacer -> metal manifold. The spacer doesn't cool the manifold by adding some distance in between the upper and lower manifold but by providing a spacer of material with really low heat transfer qualities. Metal -> metal lots a heat transfer, metal -> plastic, hardly any heat transfer.

Now i just restated what's been said over and over again anyways... grr

 

Yeah, I know nothing about cars.

One of the reasons I ran a Strip Dominator intake on my Chevelle was the air gap between the runners and the lifter valley and used an AEM cold air intake on my Accord was the reduction in intake tempertures you get. I am fully aware that reducing intake tempertures 10 degrees is roughly a 1% gain in power. What you seem to be ignoring is the 5th gen intake is already made of plastic and doesn't get as warm as the aluminum 5.5 gen intake yet the spacers still show gains. Even Aaron will tell you part of the gain from spacers are due to increased runner length.

 

never made the statement that you know nothing about cars bud. you made that assumption on your own.
yes i see what you're trying to point out now. the gains from lengthening the intake runners vs. reducing the heat will favor the DE-K's more.
gotcha.
hence why i stated in post #12 to the OP that getting a phelonic spacer will have little to no differnce because the manifold on the DE-K's are already made of plastic.
i must've mis-read your post wrong. i understood that you were stating that equal length runners in general give more power vs. lower temps.
off topic what did you have done to your chevelle? all motor? power adders? i always like to hear about other peoples past rides. : )

 

mis read his post! sorry!

 

sweet now that all the misunderstandings are cleared out we all can

 

Sold it years ago, but the last engine was a .030 over 350 that had TRW 10:1s, 041 fuelie 1.94/1.50 heads with match porting and a 3 angle valve job (engine really needed 2.02/1.60 valves though), 292 Magnum Comp Cam (244 duration @ .050, .501 lift, 106 degree centerline), Holley Strip Dominator intake, Holley 4778 (700 double pumper), Carter fuel pump, cheap Blackjack headers with 2.5" exhaust, H-pipe, Sonic Turbo Mufflers with dumps at the rear axle, built TH350 with a Hughes 4000 stall, Richmond 4.11s with factory posi, WS6 Trans Am front anti-roll bar, Lakewood ladder bars. Ran a best of 12.84 @ 108 in full street trim. Better heads and slicks and it would have been an easy low 12 car.

Excuse the driving lights, my car got wrecked and the idiots at the body shop
drilled the bumper and put the lights there instead of behind the grill like I had it. Black and white because I was taking photography in college and we were only using Kodak Tri-X B&W film.





These are from the previous engine, tossed a rod at 6500 or so.

 

I'm going to bump this thread for a related question...

Part of the spacer installation process calls for installing a "bypass" on the coolant lines to the throttle body, right? Keeping in mind that I didn't do the spacer installation myself, what's the configuration of this bypass? Meaning, do you just connect the inlet and outlets to one another on the TB, as well as on the source/destination connections for coolant fluid?

The reason I'm asking is that I had my TB replaced last fall, and it sure doesn't look like there is a bypass anymore. I think the dealership un-did that modification.

Which leads me to the larger questions: why do we bypass TB cooling with the spacers? And what's wrong with leaving it as designed?

 

What you described is precisely the way it's supposed to be done.

The reason Aaron gives us this barbed fitting is because coolant,contrary to it's name, actually provides heat to the TB, which is a hypocrisy to the mod.

In extreme climates, some TB's are said to freeze, and not open, and the heat is needed for proper operation.

My temps get down in the single digits in the winter here for a couple months, and I have yet to see any negative affects from this 'mod'.

 

Excellent explanation, Manny. Thank you!

I should contact Aaron and see about having him send me another bypass. We only hit single-digit temps a few days out of the year over here.

 

I actually got mine on before I got my spacer kit. Can't remember the size, but I got it from Lowe's. Which brings me to my next point ... I actually still have my NWP unit unopened.

 

That's because you're having too much fun with that little red Genesis.

 

Ahh, the kit is installed, but the barb isn't since I had no need for it since I had already done this supposed mod.

 

What do you mean when you say "barb"?

Can you snap a quick photo for me?

 

 

Oh!



So that would connect the outlet and inlet hoses from the water pipes together to one another? I would think it'd be cleaner to just use a longer length hose, or not use the hose at all, and clamp down on some caps.

And on the TB side of things... what? Just cap the leads?

 

Rochester... think of it as bypassing the heater core in an old american car. Same basic procedure.

 

I understand the purpose of the bypass now. It's the technique that I have questions on.

Seems to me that it would be cleaner to connect the inlet & outlet leads from the water pipes with a single hose, rather than using this hose-barb. And then simply cap the two IM leads. Yes?

Aaron tends to instruct people in ways that are easily reversable. For example, with the VIAS-delete, he never comes right out and recommends removing the VIAS vacuum tank... but it's so much cleaner without it. And without the hose from the UIM... capping that is a lot cleaner as well.

I need to eyeball the situation later tonight if I get a chance.

 

im sure aaron dynoed these on a DE-k motor before putting em up for sale

 

I'm sure he did, too.

Nothing says "thorough" like commenting on a 4 month old conversation.

 

id like to see numbers