Straight from the Shop – New Air Intake Product Development
 

Straight from the Shop – New Air Intake Product Development

Hey guys, we are working on a cool new product line and wanted to give you the first peek behind the scenes with our engineers...

As you know, we are constantly developing new products to help you push the limits. We get a ton of product suggestions from our customers, but one that really stood out to us as a great addition to our product line was air intakes.

So let’s get down to it.

Our goal is to create an intake that will not only add power, but also style and simplicity to your engine bay. We want to design a direct bolt-in replacement for instant WHP/WTQ gains, without requiring a tune, all while maintaining safe air/fuel ratios.

The first target for our new product line is a 2008+ Subaru Impreza WRX/STI cold air intake. Pictured below is our 2010 Subaru STI shop car that we will use for the development process.

http://i41.tinypic.com/2ahd15d.jpg

http://i43.tinypic.com/29xu6gk.jpg

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Our engineers go through multiple iterations and design changes to ensure that each of our products provide superior performance, tone, and aesthetics. We do our initial design right on the car since fitment is key, and then we hand make the initial set of prototypes. This time was no different, with three different prototypes created.

Our first design offered some impressive power increases because of the huge amount of air it was letting into the engine. But it caused the car to run too lean, and would require an aggressive tune in order to be safely run on a car. The design was a short ram intake, which included an enclosed box filter design. Overall, we liked the design, but decided to move forward with other options, in order to keep costs competitive, and create an intake that doesn’t require a tune.

http://i44.tinypic.com/2qipfyv.jpg

http://i43.tinypic.com/2iuol6c.jpg

The second design was a true cold air intake, with the filter placed outside of the engine bay to avoid heat. This design not only looked great, it performed great as well. But unfortunately we ran into the same issue we did with our initial design; the car ran too lean. We discovered that the cause was the diameter of our intake tube, which we took into consideration for our third design.

http://i39.tinypic.com/15efgn5.jpg

http://i43.tinypic.com/1qqwrs.jpg

http://i41.tinypic.com/mhsp6r.jpg

Our third and final design followed the same idea as the second design, being a true cold air intake. This time we changed the diameter of the piping to compensate for the air/fuel ratios we were previously seeing, which worked great. The car not only gained power, but it looked awesome, and didn’t require a tune, which filled all of our original goals.

http://i39.tinypic.com/24n03k4.jpg

http://i43.tinypic.com/1zcoepj.jpg

Stay tuned for more updates, as I will be posting them as we make more progress. Please let us know what you think, and feel free to ask me any questions!

Thanks,
Tyler

Personally I'd rather an intake that offers that greatest gains not something that doesn't require a tune... If it requiresa Retune that means it's making more power :)

Just because it doesn't require a tune, doesn't mean you can't tune it to make more power. :wink:

I will relay this information to our R&D team though. Thanks for your input!

While we are completing the prototype and finishing the renderings, we wanted to get your opinion on colors. We have several options to choose from and figured who better to ask than Subaru owners themselves. So today, we are giving you the opportunity to voice your opinion on your color preference for our new intakes!

We want to make sure that we make these intakes in colors that you want, so please vote for the color that you would purchase if you were buying a new intake for your car.

Color options are: Wrinkle Red, Wrinkle Black, and Polished Silver

Let the voting begin!

Why not leave those as the options they can purchase? I vote all 3.

Thanks for your input! We are actually leaning towards making all three color options, but we want to make sure that we have enough of each color so that everyone gets what they want. :)

Thanks,
Tyler

On any MAF based system you'll need to retain the same ID as stock on the piping section where the MAF sensor sits in order to not throw off the tune, and the air can't be too turbulent either which won't allow the MAF sensor to get a good representative sample of the air entering the motor... you probably know that but since you brought this up through your different versions just wanted to make sure you understood the reasoning behind running lean. You can have a filter that is less restrictive and allows more airflow into the motor, the MAF just has to be able to read it properly.

I liked that airbox design, its unique and seems like it would be effective in theory at least. I'd think it could be tweaked with the correct piping so that the MAF reads the air properly and runs right without a tune. A standard CAI is offered from a dozen companies out there so its a bit harder to make a big splash with that design.

As far as colors, I think wrinkle red and wrinkle black will be the two most popular.

Thanks for your input! We wanted to show that we went through multiple iterations in order to bring you all the best possible design. :)

Thanks,
Tyler

Today is the last day to vote for colors, so please let us know which colors you prefer!

The engineers have been working on rendering out the design that was chosen. Here is the first glimpse of what the final product is going to look like and several different views in 3D.

http://i43.tinypic.com/2lscrcp.jpg

http://i39.tinypic.com/sestae.jpg


Check out the final rendering:

http://i43.tinypic.com/2lacyvt.jpg

http://i44.tinypic.com/2qs9tlc.jpg

Next step – the engineering drawings and renderings are sent for sampling. We make these pipes here in the USA so turnaround time is really quick. I’ll keep you posted as soon as we have some real samples to check out and test for final performance verification.

Thanks,
Tyler