Exhaust and Intake
Since we were keeping the engine stock, any added power is going to come from the intake, exhaust, and ECU tune. Of course, in this swap you have to go to headers and custom intake and ECU anyway. For headers, the popular choice is the DC Sports KSwap header which reportedly makes good power and is very affordable. Realize that whatever header you choose, you will have to do some custom fabrication to get it to mate up to whatever exhaust you use. The information from the resellers is not very clear on this, but trust me, it is true. So originally we went with the DC Sports setup. For exhaust, we did not want a "Fart Can" that would attract attention but we also did not want to sacrifice on the performance end either. After a lot of research we would up going with the Tanabe Concept G for it's 93db sound rating yet high flow efficiency. The 60mm stainless exhaust is of the best quality and the fitment was excellent. It is quite around town and at idle, but when you get on it, especially when the VTEC kicks in, the sound is, well what can we say, beautiful. We are very pleased with this choice and I think the end dyno results point to good overall efficiency. Bigger is not better when it comes to exhaust and header tuning and many people do not understand the physics behind it.
Back to the headers. The DC Sports fit quite well, lots of clearance, and for the money we have no complaint. But it just did not fit in with the rest of the car. We understand you get what you pay for and we also understand that this header is a good value. But for us, the fit and finish just was not overwhelming. There was not much else around at the time, although now we see it looks like Skunk2 has come out with a very nice setup. We took the advice of CRXBart and I called Six Sigma Racing and talked to the owner, Danny. After a long conversation, we was sold on his product. He is a small shop and custom makes anything you want. It is a beautiful header and the end power numbers confirm this sucker works. The downside is that the fitment is very tight and count on doing some minor cutting and tweaking to get it in. But in the end we think this was the right choice.
As we mentioned, the coupling of the exhaust to the header requires some exhaust fabrication of the first section of the Tanabe exhaust. It had to be cut, shortened, and jogged over an couple of inches and a 2 bolt exhaust flange and donut from Vibrant was used to mate with the header. The pipe runs pretty close to the bottom of the shifter box so we wrapped that section with some exhaust blanket insulation from Cool-it. We also covered the headers in the engine compartment with the same insulation to keep the temperatures down a bit.
The intake for this swap is all over the place. There are no bolt in solutions and everyone seems to do something a bit different. We wanted something clean, and believe me a lot of what I have seen is not very clean, not to say they don't work, however. I stumbled across a product from Brian at Karcepts which he was selling for the EG. It consists of a kit with some PVC couplers, a long runner tube that mates to an elbow and a mounted connector on the front fender hole where the windshield washer fluid tank is (was) mounted (you really didn't want those windshield washers anyway). It then connects to an elbow with a K&N cone type filter located (just barely) within the fender liner where all that nice cool air can be sucked into the engine. It looked like it might fit except for the runner tube. So I talked to Brian and got the kit without the runner tube and sourced a straight runner tube from Vibrant. It fit like it was meant to be, and looked good too! The air filter just fits behind the fender liner where there is a gap for fresh air. It rides low so you better not hit any large puddles with this setup.
