02/08/04 - The header and intake I ordered about six weeks ago finally showed up. Finally, some easy bolt-on stuff that should go on with no trouble, right? Yeah, sure. The very first exhaust manifold stud broke off at the surface after making two whole revolutions with the wrench. I was able to drill into it enough to get a screw extractor in there to remove it, but it didn't go easily. The stud remainder was loose enough that it would run down and bottom out in the thread bore when I tried to drill it out. I didn't want to drill into the head so I had to be extra careful. It finally came out. The next problem was finding a replacement metric stud on a weekend in town. Hupp Hardware - my favorite hardware store for fasteners had it though. I should have gone to Hupp first instead of wasting time at two auto parts stores and a local Ace Hardware.

After that the header went on easily enough. Since this is a one-peice header, I had to remove the lower front sub-frame but that was no big deal since the rest of the front end is pretty much off the car anyway. It sure is nice to bolt on shiny stuff.

Next came the cold air intake. The place I ordered it from said it was for an Integra but it should cross over to a CRX with no trouble. They gave me a pretty good deal on it so I figured I would just modify it if it didn't fit. Well, it didn't fit. I ended up cutting 3/4" off the engine side and about 4" off the filter side and I had to bend the mounting bracket around a bit. Not a big deal but it would have been nice to just bolt it on. It is still much better than what I originally planned, which was to just fabricate something from some straight 2.5" exhaust pipe. Even with the handwork it was much less effort than building something from scratch. I don't really like the bright blue breather hose. May need to do something about that later.

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