Engine - Intake manifold modifications

I want to have the engine looking a bit more "Hot Rod" so one of the things I want to do is make the engine look a little more symmetrical.

This is what the engine looks like as it comes straight out of the Toyota donor car. I need to do away with that plastic engine cover and try an have a bit more of the engine exposed.

A few of the alloy parts will be polished and some parts painted the same colour as the car. This should give me the overall look I am after, but.......

You can see here the engine isn't very symmetrical with a large intake pipe coming in from the left of the picture. This is basically a big air tube and on the end of it there will ultimately be an air filter.

The piece to the far left in this next picture is the AFM or air flow meter. This tells the computer how much air is going into the engine. Then there is a black pipe that goes into large alloy piece. This alloy piece is called the throttle body. You can see a couple of cables coming off the the top of it at the very top of the picture. One of these is the throttle cable that goes down to the accelerator pedal and the other one goes to the cruise control module which tugs on this or releases it, to regulate the car to the set cruise control speed.

Here is the unit taken off the motor. The large plastic box beneath the tube is also part of it and is basically a reservoir I believe, so that if you stomp on the gas the engine can take a gulp of air.

You can see here, how much tidier the engine is with the unit removed.

The plan now is to remount the intake at the rear of the engine. Here's what it will look like. 

Here's another view from the back of the engine.

And now looking down on top.

So now I need to remove the intake manifold and modify it. Actually not quite true, I bought another one so that if it is a failure, I still have the original one undisturbed.

So lets get into. First of all I hacked the mounting flange of the side of the manifold. 

Then hacked the top off the manifold.

After hollowing out the back of the manifold the flange now mates up to its new home.

I will now need to make up some fillets to join the flange and make it airtight to the top of the manifold.

 Here are all the components ready to go.

This is a plate that will block off the hole where the throttle body used to mount.

Here are all the inlet parts being held in place.

After Tony Field took to it with a pulse mig welder and a polisher as well.....it came out like this. Pretty pleased with that! Thanks Tony!

This next picture shows the new manifold sitting on top of the old one. I'll just bolt the new one on in place of the old one, then I can re-plumb all the vacuum lines, a water cooling line, then remount the throttle body and air flow meter. Then we can fire up again. 

A few weeks later I finally got round to doing all that and here it is....its quite hard to see so double click the images if you want a closer look.

As you can see from the front its now all looking nice and symmetrical.

Now that it is all plumbed up, what better excuse than this to try firing up the engine and see if it will run okay following the change. So after hooking up a few wires and fuel, I gave it go and it ran perfectly.....a bit noisy for the neighbours.....but perfect from where was standing!

Now the next step is to make an engine cover out of a rubbish bin. Yes thats right I will make my engine cover out of a rubbish bin!!!!