What's going to be your NEXT mod?

So, you’ve put the high-end sound system in your car (your subs, components, tweeters, etc), you’ve been heard coming down the road a mile away, and you’ve impressed many of the kids who do not have cars yet. Nice job, but wait, you’re still not satisfied? Fair enough, I understand car guys, or girls, like you. You are the type of people who will not stop. Upgrades are things that drive you to build your car to best it can be and the best you want it to be. Here’s an upgrade that you may want to be careful of though: putting an air intake into a car that’s not even fast. For example, after my subs, I wanted to make my 1997 Nissan Altima GXE faster! Now, it seemed like the coolest thing in the world at the time, but now that I think about it, I realize how much money I really wasted in attempting to install one. The first mistake I did was go to Ebay, then I bought the cheapest air intake I could find for $40 ($11.25 for shipping), because I was a 16-year-old teenager on a budget. The second mistake I did was to think that, with my 0% knowledge of car engines, I could install it myself.

So, with my new intake, 0% knowledge of car engines and how they work, and cheap hand-me-down tools, I went to work. I first took out the factory intake making sure I had all the parts labeled and knew where they went back into the engine (if I needed to put them back for some reason). Then, I proceeded to put the new air intake in, but I couldn’t figure out what all the holes in it were for. So, I basically took an educated guess, and actually got it right for the most part. Turns out the hoses that were connected to the factory intake just plugged right into the new intake. After I reconnected all of the hoses to the new intake I went to start the car. It had actually worked, for about 5 seconds, until it died. So I trouble shot the problem and found out I had forgotten to put a bolt on that was causing air to leak out (which ended up causing the computer to read low air and could not combine enough gas and air to keep the engine running).

After all that, I finally got it to start and remain started but the idle was still very low. Idle is when you start your car and your engine just runs but you're in park so the needle should be at about 1,000 rpm (which is normal) but my car was idle was about 500 rpm (which is bad). “This can’t stay like this,” I said to myself. So I took it over to a little shop nearby, which cost me $85 for a diagnostic fee, and they told me that they didn’t even know what was wrong with it but that they would go ahead and put the factory one back on (this ran me another $45 for labor!). As I drove back home, with my factory intake, I pondered on what all I had accomplished with this install:

$40 – New Air Intake
$11.25 – Shipping of New Air Intake
$85 – Diagnostic Fee
+ $45 – Labor Fee
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$181.25 – Wasted Weekend and the same thing I started with

As you may be able to tell, this was definitely not worth the time or the money. But on a positive note, if you know somebody or actually know how to install these systems in your car, by all means go right ahead (It is actually pretty cool once it truly works properly). Now I know I said not to install on slow cars that may be called “ricers,” in a sense, but this is your car not mine. I just didn’t know what I was doing and it wasn’t like I had a great car to begin with anyways. But if you ever have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask me because I have been through it all and I know what to expect. Hopefully you have gained some knowledge from this and hope all your future or current projects and upgrades go well.