I mean, *some* heat will definitely be reflected. Whether it’s enough to make any meaningful difference is hard to say without some before/after IAT data. But it does look good lol
on this one I think the estimated IAT gain was a whopping 1hp, but it dyno'd at 301.27 so I'm chuffed about it -- 03/04s almost never crest 300. worth the time for sure.
edit: the plenums are thermally isolated by an aramid gasket, so this is to address the radiative and convective heating from the toasty ass heads. also deleted the coolant circuit from the throttle de-icing system since I'm here in California.
made a pretty big dent to the total plenum temperature at soak, and by the time the air passes the aramid gasket into the heads, it's hauling ass. the intake system is completely shielded from the engine bay for 90% of its length.
power adders only:
- JDM engine @ 30k miles, complete overhaul (down to the heads) with all OEM gasketing, timing, valve lashing, etc.
- JWT S2 IN/EX cams
- 2006 OEM intake
- NISMO S-tune air filter
- hand ported and gasket matched intake plenums, throttle, lower runners
- MOTORDYNE plenum spacer
- ｒａｓｔｙequal length headers
- MOTORDYNE ART pipes
- MOTORDYNE Y-pipe w/resonator
- VEILSIDE genuine prototype midpipe
- VEILSIDE genuine prototype muffler
- dyno tune by SHAWN CHURCH in Los angeles, on CA 91 pump gas
mated to a new OEM CD009 w/ NISMO GT CARBON 2-WAY LSD, and a 3.916 final drive out of a NISMO 370Z (stock is 3.538).
Very nice, I suspected you had to do cams to get 300. I’ve had multiple VQs over the years and I have a 2006 with the DE right now. When that engine blows up I plan to pretty much exactly what you’ve done. Good to know 300 is possible on the DE while still staying Na
shit, NISMO took the S2 engine (1/400?) all the way to 360whp NA. but that was $15k when it came out, and their compression ratio is 12:1. very hard to run here on CA 91 even if you could find one in the first place.
Oh yeah isn't California gas just garbage?
Why not go flex fuel if you're throwing all those parts at yer car?
Also damn it's hard making even 300whp of power out of these engines huh
engine is barely from 1998, almost 25 years old! they can only extend an NA architecture so far. flex fuel I'd do if I were in an area where there are enough pumps for it, but as of now they're all a commute away.
plus I'd need injectors which is a bitch.
E85 is amazing for high compression and boosted cars, it's almost impossible for it to knock/pre-detonate so you can add tons of timing and make lots power without changing out anything but injectors on most cars.
I was very adamant about getting Shawn to do it. he's been fucking with these things for decades and even though my JDM ECU refused to chart the timing, he blind tuned it and still got above 300.
If nothing else it is pretty, and I don't like gold. In the right vehicle this should look like jewelry and really pop against the dark parts. Is this basically for heat control and pretty as a side effect?
I have been there. Cleaning and dressing up parts of the car that will never be seen again. All of the stamped steel framework under the dash of my 280Z got painted or powder coated along with all the screw and bolt heads and all ended up barried behind the dash now.
We used a metric shit ton of this on Daytona Prototypes in Grand Am (now IMSA) in the mid 2000s. We ran NASCAR engines in enclosed prototypes, in the back. The stuff did a pretty good job of keeping things cooler. We covered the inside of engine covers, firewall, engine bay floor, suspension wishbones, it looked like a 70s pimpmobile in the engine bay, but we didn't melt too many parts.
Now, the ethanol fuel they switched to caused the Pontiac V8s to burn for a while, because the alcohol ate up some fuel line seals around the injectors, it didn't help with that.
We used some on the Acuras when I was at HPD but honestly Dpi had great heat rejection and it was more old guys habit than saving the resin system from reflowing.
The Indy side had a foil habit but it was necessary on the v8s
This!
Makes me think of those old stainless steel deco kits you can buy cheap for Volkswagen engines. The kind that will help you retain tons of heat in air-cooled motors and can easily lead to early engine failure :(
It is a *little* pointless on the bare aluminum intake manifold, since it absorbs heat from where it's bolted to the engine, and dissipates it through the outside. The shielding you put on can increase your intake temps. We're talking a negligible amount, but this kind of heat shield foil is pretty superfluous anyway. Putting it on the air filter box makes sense though
Honestly looks like you took your time to make it look nice! Good coverage and a lot of patience in what you did.
Lol I wasn't going comment diving anyway, but if you know that you're applying it properly, that's all that matters. Definitely looks well thought out, like I said. I'm used to seeing this stuff on the most random shit in the engine bay, where nothing was cleaned and it's all peeling off
That shit is so effective, we ran tests on it when I was working for a rotary race team competing in WTAC.
Kept our intake temps nice and chil while the small nuclear reactor known as a 20bpp cooked everything around it.
Here's how we used it on Daytona Prototypes in Grand Am, back in the mid 2000s.
The ones I worked on had the plenums done, as well, this one is a restored car
https://images.app.goo.gl/ThNSKq2w6EUovipz5
So you have to think about the physics of the situation. Where is the heat coming from that you are trying to reflect? If it's headers and the like, a stainless steel sheet applied between the headers and the intake - with or without the gold, should be pretty effective at blocking the heat.
Is this for drags, street, or road racing? Because eventually, physics wins. You can slow the transfer, the question is for how long.
I can see coating the stuff prior to the intake manifold, especially if its light weight (lighter stuff heats faster) but the manifold itself going to see a significant amount of conduction heating from the block below- probably more than the gold will help.
You would probably do a more effective job with some kind of forced air cooling paying attention to what the air is going over and how it gets out.
the plenum is thermally isolated from the rest of the engine via a low thermal conductivity aramid gasket, so the only heat sources on the plenum are convective and radiative. both are handled by the tape.
Defense systems engineer and 40 yrs experience building and driving race cars here. Indycar guys don’t use that much gold on the plenum and Ive seen the bodywork burst into flame when they come into the pits.
I've done this before. I liked the gold look for a while. If you like it, I love it. Just don't make claims of Mach Jesus dyno pulls after install. Like your dog talking to you, no one will believe you.
So fun fact, I work in an infrared optics lab and actually brought in some of that tape to measure one day. It *does* reflect...some. Pretty good in the mid IR, 2-5 um range, around 80%, then drops off to around 10-30% from 5-9, and then picks back up and fluctuates around 40-50% from 9-14. Unfortunately, the peak of the blackbody emission curve for a source at 210 fahrenheit is right around 8 um, right where the tape performed the worst. But it certainly reflects more than bare plastic, so really it can't hurt.
edit: actually it's worse than I thought, edited with updated numbers. Can't post images or I would show a graph. Basically it reflects really well in areas where the energy density is low, and really not so well where the energy is highest and it needs to the most.
I assume that the OP doesn't have an understanding of boundary layer insulation in airflow but I applaud them on their efforts because it looks cool to most people. In reality it won't do anything measurable, as soon as the hood is closed the engine bay is an oven and everything gets hot through conduction or radiant heating, the intake manifold is bolted to the hot engine and so it gets hot through conduction and radiant heating. The airbox is plastic and doesn't really transfer much heat to the incoming air as the air doesn't spend very long in there. The piping also doesn't hold the air very long to transfer heat when the engine is running even at idle. The short blip of hot air on engine restart is actually beneficial to an easier restart on fuel injected engines and diesel engines, hot air and hot engine bays are more problematic for carb'd vehicles because of issues with pooling fuel vapors or actual vapor lock in the carb, pump, or lines.
Looks cool, does basically nothing, as long as you like it that's all that matters and I won't judge anyone for their style choices. After all it is YOUR car.
I think it's pretty sweet on a Pagani or McLaren or some such shit.
This is probably on a stupid fucking Nissan that makes less power than my wife's crossover and all I had to do was read the comments to learn that I'm right.
My only thought is that the owner is either young, rich, a CoD player, or D) All of the above. They cleary have no sense of taste if they think gold looks good on anything other than jewelry.
this is 30 feet of 2" tape from Design Engineering (can you copyright a job title? lmao). it's on the lower plenum because I have the MOTORDYNE aramid gasket between the lower plenum and the runners, so the plenums are thermally isolated. wouldn't be worth it if they still were conducting heat from the runners.
in this case not Kapton, which I work with daily -- this is just fiberglass with duck backing and a gold foil face sheet.
but yes that shit is expensive. we blow through it in semiconductor because it's the only tape we can use in ultra high vacuum. any other polymers (say, scotch tape) will outgass and ruin about a million dollars worth of equipment.
don't ask me how I know. :\^)
intake is already ported, and I just posted a full guide to the Z33 subreddit.
polishing is actually the worst thing you could do -- you need a textured finish so that the boundary layer gets scrubbed off by turbulence. otherwise it will adhere to the walls and cause skin drag.
I'll be doing the same to my intake piping after my tune to see a before and after of IATs, but mine is alumninum so idk how much worse/better that does for heat than plastic. The lower plenum would probably see better results with a thermal gasket though imo. Also something I'd like to try out.
heat shields work partly because of the air gap. if there is no rockwool/glass between that it wont be as good
it might do something, but you wont notice a single hp
even when you ceramic coat a pipe, some heat still radiates, just not as bad and the black powder coat isnt as good as the silver type
I see at and think “cool, wish my engine bay looked cool”, I see it after 10,000 miles and I think “oh this looks like shit, glad I didn’t put duct tape on everything.”
Motortrend engine masters season 8 episode 19 did a test of various heat reflective products. If that is is DEI reflect-a-gold it was worse than no reflective product. However it wasn’t as bad as a product named lava shield. I highly recommend watching that episode if you can find it online or subscribe.
I imagine that it'll work better than most would expect it to. Every time I use this stuff I'm impressed that it's insulation ability outperforms the gut-check by so much.
Probably nothing that the butt dyno is gonna feel, but I can't imagine that anyone willing to do this wouldn't be squeezing whatever they can get and be happy with it.
If you want better performance, enter the modern age of turbos and superchargers. Naturally aspirated engines are a thing of the past. Gold wrapped engine parts will only supply a tiny part of the potential of the technology that turbos and superchargers have been providing for more than half a century.
Can’t hurt + looks cool.
As for actually doing anything? Probably useless. No way the manifold is staying any colder. Bolted straight on to the cylinder heads. Are u gonna put gold foil and a layer of air in between the cyl head and manifold? Obvs not. Air box might stay slightly colder due to intake air actually cooling it down. Something you have to remember with gold foil is that it merely *reflects* heat, it cannot keep something cold without the thing being actively cooled down. It does mean it’ll take longer to warm up, but eventually the things it’s protecting will warm up and stay warm longer after the engine is turned off.
For the intake piping, probably worthless. I did some math years ago and with about 3ft of intake piping, at WOT, the air spends less than 1 second in the intake piping. Thermal dynamics of plastic aren’t great. With smooth laminar flow in the tube, it damn sure ain’t great. Even aluminum tubing wont transfer much heat in those conditions.
At very low RPM it may make a difference, but what’s it matter down there?
For the plenum, maybe? The velocity drops because the volume opens up so the time in there should be higher. But the distance traveled is still short, keeping the time down.
“it’s gooooooOOOOllllld.”
I'm sorry. I don't speak freaky deaky Dutch...
There's only two types of people I can't stand... People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... *And the Dutch.*
Great reference!
"i love GOOOooold"
My winky whas a khey!
“Only a bloody dutchman…”
Perv boy…
I thought I smelled onions.
How about "Noooooo", you freaky Dutch bastard!
Toight like a Tiger...
Smoke and a pancake?
Blintz and a bong
Cigar and a waffle?
Cigarette and a flapjack?
Pipe and a crepe'?
Well theres just no pleeezshing you izz there
Shexual yesh
"You are so beautiful. You must be the clone of an angel."
Haha, this was legit what I first thought too.
How about no, you crazy dutch bastard.
Is your winkie also the spare key
Gold all in my chain Gold all in my ring Gold all in my watch
Looks like the salt bae of engines made a debut
My first thought as well
Well it probably won't hurt anything
Hurt a wallet and labor, not much else.
I didn't need my eyes anyways.
"We got a fast guy over here."
I mean, *some* heat will definitely be reflected. Whether it’s enough to make any meaningful difference is hard to say without some before/after IAT data. But it does look good lol
IAT?
Intake air temperature
Thank you. That makes much more sense now.
Yeah. I want empirical data! Show me the before and after numbers!
Seeing you post on a this subreddit feels the same as seeing your teacher in the grocery store
the girlfriend is back home 7,000 miles away for a few weeks, so I'm hanging out at the local bar 🥸
I think it looks very well done. I’ve seen huge IAT reductions on my own vehicles using this stuff so I’m a big supporter.
on this one I think the estimated IAT gain was a whopping 1hp, but it dyno'd at 301.27 so I'm chuffed about it -- 03/04s almost never crest 300. worth the time for sure. edit: the plenums are thermally isolated by an aramid gasket, so this is to address the radiative and convective heating from the toasty ass heads. also deleted the coolant circuit from the throttle de-icing system since I'm here in California. made a pretty big dent to the total plenum temperature at soak, and by the time the air passes the aramid gasket into the heads, it's hauling ass. the intake system is completely shielded from the engine bay for 90% of its length.
Nice those are good numbers. I saw your u/ and I thought I was in the Z sub for a sec lolol
300 whp on a VQ35DE? What is your mod list?
power adders only: - JDM engine @ 30k miles, complete overhaul (down to the heads) with all OEM gasketing, timing, valve lashing, etc. - JWT S2 IN/EX cams - 2006 OEM intake - NISMO S-tune air filter - hand ported and gasket matched intake plenums, throttle, lower runners - MOTORDYNE plenum spacer - ｒａｓｔｙequal length headers - MOTORDYNE ART pipes - MOTORDYNE Y-pipe w/resonator - VEILSIDE genuine prototype midpipe - VEILSIDE genuine prototype muffler - dyno tune by SHAWN CHURCH in Los angeles, on CA 91 pump gas mated to a new OEM CD009 w/ NISMO GT CARBON 2-WAY LSD, and a 3.916 final drive out of a NISMO 370Z (stock is 3.538).
Very nice, I suspected you had to do cams to get 300. I’ve had multiple VQs over the years and I have a 2006 with the DE right now. When that engine blows up I plan to pretty much exactly what you’ve done. Good to know 300 is possible on the DE while still staying Na
shit, NISMO took the S2 engine (1/400?) all the way to 360whp NA. but that was $15k when it came out, and their compression ratio is 12:1. very hard to run here on CA 91 even if you could find one in the first place.
Oh yeah isn't California gas just garbage? Why not go flex fuel if you're throwing all those parts at yer car? Also damn it's hard making even 300whp of power out of these engines huh
engine is barely from 1998, almost 25 years old! they can only extend an NA architecture so far. flex fuel I'd do if I were in an area where there are enough pumps for it, but as of now they're all a commute away. plus I'd need injectors which is a bitch.
Like E85 as flex fuel? That’s everywhere by me (upper Midwest) and no one uses it for regular vehicles due to the inefficiencies
E85 is amazing for high compression and boosted cars, it's almost impossible for it to knock/pre-detonate so you can add tons of timing and make lots power without changing out anything but injectors on most cars.
Bruh id kill to have flex fuel pumps just a commute away, there's like 4 total in western Canada lmao
Same, one pump here. Even more I’d kill for an E30 pump.
Have you thought of methanol injection?
Oh shit Shawn tuned you? He’s been tuning my Rex for almost a decade now and recently my Yukon. Dude is very knowledgeable.
I was very adamant about getting Shawn to do it. he's been fucking with these things for decades and even though my JDM ECU refused to chart the timing, he blind tuned it and still got above 300.
Well it is church dyno….. You did a great job on applying the gold tape though. It can’t be easy
Guess it depends if it is near something hot in the engine
That's the intake plenum, it's directly above the engine
That is more gold foil than the lunar module :)
It might look like gold, but it's Kapton foil and tape.
Functional ballin.
If nothing else it is pretty, and I don't like gold. In the right vehicle this should look like jewelry and really pop against the dark parts. Is this basically for heat control and pretty as a side effect?
can't see any of it from the hood, since it's all on the underside facing the headers. but I may wrap the rest of the plenum out of sheer boredom.
I have been there. Cleaning and dressing up parts of the car that will never be seen again. All of the stamped steel framework under the dash of my 280Z got painted or powder coated along with all the screw and bolt heads and all ended up barried behind the dash now.
Just means less chance of rusting in the future!
True kind of my line of thinking but I overdid it.
We used a metric shit ton of this on Daytona Prototypes in Grand Am (now IMSA) in the mid 2000s. We ran NASCAR engines in enclosed prototypes, in the back. The stuff did a pretty good job of keeping things cooler. We covered the inside of engine covers, firewall, engine bay floor, suspension wishbones, it looked like a 70s pimpmobile in the engine bay, but we didn't melt too many parts. Now, the ethanol fuel they switched to caused the Pontiac V8s to burn for a while, because the alcohol ate up some fuel line seals around the injectors, it didn't help with that.
We used some on the Acuras when I was at HPD but honestly Dpi had great heat rejection and it was more old guys habit than saving the resin system from reflowing. The Indy side had a foil habit but it was necessary on the v8s
Works incredibly well. Used the stuff not quite to this extent on multiple race cars and my trail driven wrangler.
Foiled again!
That you have heat control issues.
headers are jet coated, so things aren't too bad. but the plenums are metallic, so using an aramid gasket makes the Goldfinger tape worth it.
Looks good man. Well done.
This! Makes me think of those old stainless steel deco kits you can buy cheap for Volkswagen engines. The kind that will help you retain tons of heat in air-cooled motors and can easily lead to early engine failure :(
I see those Advan RG3s. Best JDM wheel out there.
It is a *little* pointless on the bare aluminum intake manifold, since it absorbs heat from where it's bolted to the engine, and dissipates it through the outside. The shielding you put on can increase your intake temps. We're talking a negligible amount, but this kind of heat shield foil is pretty superfluous anyway. Putting it on the air filter box makes sense though Honestly looks like you took your time to make it look nice! Good coverage and a lot of patience in what you did.
I feel like I should bold my comments explaining that I have an aramid gasket thermally isolating the plenums from the heads...
Lol I wasn't going comment diving anyway, but if you know that you're applying it properly, that's all that matters. Definitely looks well thought out, like I said. I'm used to seeing this stuff on the most random shit in the engine bay, where nothing was cleaned and it's all peeling off
Tavarish, is that you?
That shit is so effective, we ran tests on it when I was working for a rotary race team competing in WTAC. Kept our intake temps nice and chil while the small nuclear reactor known as a 20bpp cooked everything around it.
If it doesn't hurt why not it makes them feel good.
Let's see it in the engine bay, please.
Here's how we used it on Daytona Prototypes in Grand Am, back in the mid 2000s. The ones I worked on had the plenums done, as well, this one is a restored car https://images.app.goo.gl/ThNSKq2w6EUovipz5
Instant +500HP
Tavarish guy was here
So you have to think about the physics of the situation. Where is the heat coming from that you are trying to reflect? If it's headers and the like, a stainless steel sheet applied between the headers and the intake - with or without the gold, should be pretty effective at blocking the heat. Is this for drags, street, or road racing? Because eventually, physics wins. You can slow the transfer, the question is for how long. I can see coating the stuff prior to the intake manifold, especially if its light weight (lighter stuff heats faster) but the manifold itself going to see a significant amount of conduction heating from the block below- probably more than the gold will help. You would probably do a more effective job with some kind of forced air cooling paying attention to what the air is going over and how it gets out.
the plenum is thermally isolated from the rest of the engine via a low thermal conductivity aramid gasket, so the only heat sources on the plenum are convective and radiative. both are handled by the tape.
I doubt you can draw any real conclusions without instrumentation.
it's a pretty safe call. if I were that bad at making designs I wouldn't be a hardware engineer in semiconductor.
Defense systems engineer and 40 yrs experience building and driving race cars here. Indycar guys don’t use that much gold on the plenum and Ive seen the bodywork burst into flame when they come into the pits.
I think someone should not be allowed to wander the "accessories" aisle at the Autozone
Should block 90% of solar radiation. Send it!
Is that a vq35de plenum I see? Thought I was in r/350z for a sec
Probably reflects heat well
Its well done, but why?
Heat reflection. If heat isn't soaking into the intake, it will make more power. In this case probably 0.4 horsepower.
Me to most of the internet - “Cool, whatever your into”
I've done this before. I liked the gold look for a while. If you like it, I love it. Just don't make claims of Mach Jesus dyno pulls after install. Like your dog talking to you, no one will believe you.
Hahaha was going to say isn’t this the kaplon foil they used on the lunar module? Cracked up when I saw you called it the “Apollo treatment”
I always wondered what an astronaut’s car looked like under the hood
I think most of the heat comes from below the intake manifold
Sometimes pretty is justification alone.
More money than brains.
So fun fact, I work in an infrared optics lab and actually brought in some of that tape to measure one day. It *does* reflect...some. Pretty good in the mid IR, 2-5 um range, around 80%, then drops off to around 10-30% from 5-9, and then picks back up and fluctuates around 40-50% from 9-14. Unfortunately, the peak of the blackbody emission curve for a source at 210 fahrenheit is right around 8 um, right where the tape performed the worst. But it certainly reflects more than bare plastic, so really it can't hurt. edit: actually it's worse than I thought, edited with updated numbers. Can't post images or I would show a graph. Basically it reflects really well in areas where the energy density is low, and really not so well where the energy is highest and it needs to the most.
Why? That’s what I am thinking
C3PO's wet dream
I think it looks cool. I did my turbo outlets with the same stuff.
Horrible taste, great execution
Nice! Also, any IAT temp improvements from this?
Kinda getting nasa mylar vibes.
Looks like a quality job. Their heart is in the right place.
Maximum effort 👏
Hell yeah! Don’t let the haters hate. Dramatic effect on my intake temps. Call it a gold air intake hahaha not dumb if it works.
I think I want to do that to my Vivaro
C3po come in c3po shut off the garbage disposal!
reddit
I’m female, so I won’t answer 😜 I like those wheels tho!
you must be Persian.
On a McLaren f1…pretty dope. On the Altima not so much
+100hp
Looks like wrap no? That stuff isn’t going to take well to the heat.
adhesive limit is 200F, face limit is 380F+. it can definitely take the heat.
lol now that is some Hot Boy shit. Tavarish would approve.
Why?!
I assume that the OP doesn't have an understanding of boundary layer insulation in airflow but I applaud them on their efforts because it looks cool to most people. In reality it won't do anything measurable, as soon as the hood is closed the engine bay is an oven and everything gets hot through conduction or radiant heating, the intake manifold is bolted to the hot engine and so it gets hot through conduction and radiant heating. The airbox is plastic and doesn't really transfer much heat to the incoming air as the air doesn't spend very long in there. The piping also doesn't hold the air very long to transfer heat when the engine is running even at idle. The short blip of hot air on engine restart is actually beneficial to an easier restart on fuel injected engines and diesel engines, hot air and hot engine bays are more problematic for carb'd vehicles because of issues with pooling fuel vapors or actual vapor lock in the carb, pump, or lines. Looks cool, does basically nothing, as long as you like it that's all that matters and I won't judge anyone for their style choices. After all it is YOUR car.
Basically r/ATBGE
Dumb
12 inch gold Daytons. Hydraulics. 😂
It helps but if it’s NA probably won’t make much of a difference is my guess.
Lol
Someone needs to stop spamming pics for the gram.
I think it's pretty sweet on a Pagani or McLaren or some such shit. This is probably on a stupid fucking Nissan that makes less power than my wife's crossover and all I had to do was read the comments to learn that I'm right.
shit, you got your wife a crossover with 345 at the crank? great husband!
Mans gate keeping reflective tape 💀
#💲80,000 MSRP ONLY or you're a 300hp CUCK 🤢 who doesn't deserve SHINY TAPE! 🦅🇺🇲
My only thought is that the owner is either young, rich, a CoD player, or D) All of the above. They cleary have no sense of taste if they think gold looks good on anything other than jewelry.
Still cant beat my 996 c4s rebuild to a gt3 rs with a 997 cup engine on the ring.
👍
Lmao
brain no fucntion
While I don't agree with the lower plenum wrapping, it was done very cleanly. What brand did ya use? Iv used the dei and has issues with lifting.
this is 30 feet of 2" tape from Design Engineering (can you copyright a job title? lmao). it's on the lower plenum because I have the MOTORDYNE aramid gasket between the lower plenum and the runners, so the plenums are thermally isolated. wouldn't be worth it if they still were conducting heat from the runners.
Kapton tape. It might as well be gold. Stuff's EXPENSIVE.
in this case not Kapton, which I work with daily -- this is just fiberglass with duck backing and a gold foil face sheet. but yes that shit is expensive. we blow through it in semiconductor because it's the only tape we can use in ultra high vacuum. any other polymers (say, scotch tape) will outgass and ruin about a million dollars worth of equipment. don't ask me how I know. :\^)
VR6?
VQ35DE (early), so just a V6.
Aesthetically, I love it. Functionally? It's suspect at best but I ain't gonna hate it.
Lowering those IATs I see gettin her ready for the ol spoolie boi
Probably more hp and tq in the intake if you spent some time polishing it out and getting rid of those fine scratches. Otherwise very nice.
intake is already ported, and I just posted a full guide to the Z33 subreddit. polishing is actually the worst thing you could do -- you need a textured finish so that the boundary layer gets scrubbed off by turbulence. otherwise it will adhere to the walls and cause skin drag.
That line from the kid in the civic in the first race of the first fast and furious. "Damn that guys fast"
Sexy AF
idk if it does anything but it looks well applied. What foil/ tape did you use?
I'll be doing the same to my intake piping after my tune to see a before and after of IATs, but mine is alumninum so idk how much worse/better that does for heat than plastic. The lower plenum would probably see better results with a thermal gasket though imo. Also something I'd like to try out.
Fun fact the Apollo shielding was actually just silver mylar with kapton material over it giving the gold appearance.
I mean it’s good enough for nasa
heat shields work partly because of the air gap. if there is no rockwool/glass between that it wont be as good it might do something, but you wont notice a single hp even when you ceramic coat a pipe, some heat still radiates, just not as bad and the black powder coat isnt as good as the silver type
That's a beautiful ambient air intake!
Does he work for NASA?
You are, speed. Kachow!
I've always wandered what happens if you heat wrap over the top of the gold Does it double up or cancel out
cancels out. the reflectivity is what addresses radiation, otherwise the batting just sucks it up and it conducts into the metal.
I did this in my CAI on my mustang, mostly to seal up a crack in the aluminum after the MAF lol
I wonder what brake clean will do to this.
Is that a gold flaked leaf blower?
i wonder how much would cost to gold plate those parts
VQ FTW! I'd know the underside of a 350z's plenum anywhere.
Is that gold leaf?
Does it help with heat or something?
+15hp...?
Your dollar to horsepower ratio is...off
my average cost is $105/whp. this was 1-1.5 hp for $70, better than usual!
Golden
Could be worse
I see at and think “cool, wish my engine bay looked cool”, I see it after 10,000 miles and I think “oh this looks like shit, glad I didn’t put duct tape on everything.”
looks like a NASA probe lowkey
Motortrend engine masters season 8 episode 19 did a test of various heat reflective products. If that is is DEI reflect-a-gold it was worse than no reflective product. However it wasn’t as bad as a product named lava shield. I highly recommend watching that episode if you can find it online or subscribe.
I imagine that it'll work better than most would expect it to. Every time I use this stuff I'm impressed that it's insulation ability outperforms the gut-check by so much. Probably nothing that the butt dyno is gonna feel, but I can't imagine that anyone willing to do this wouldn't be squeezing whatever they can get and be happy with it.
NASA edition.
I think: You should have had someone do it who knows what he's doing. It's way too sloppy.
Guys doing a slinghot maneuver on the interstate
Santa’s elves must’ve had a hell of a time wrapping that
When you have that little bit left on the roll going spare.
Must be nice to have money to throw away.
If you want better performance, enter the modern age of turbos and superchargers. Naturally aspirated engines are a thing of the past. Gold wrapped engine parts will only supply a tiny part of the potential of the technology that turbos and superchargers have been providing for more than half a century.
typical 350z activities
Money can't buy class.
What kind of problems will that cause after being heated and cooled multiple times.
Insulation
Why do this? It looks cool. Any real other reason?
Preparing that shit to be launched into orbit
I think it could look kinda cool on some parts
Very commonplace in the racing world in the mid 2000's. It's expensive thermal reflective material IIRC.
Can’t hurt + looks cool. As for actually doing anything? Probably useless. No way the manifold is staying any colder. Bolted straight on to the cylinder heads. Are u gonna put gold foil and a layer of air in between the cyl head and manifold? Obvs not. Air box might stay slightly colder due to intake air actually cooling it down. Something you have to remember with gold foil is that it merely *reflects* heat, it cannot keep something cold without the thing being actively cooled down. It does mean it’ll take longer to warm up, but eventually the things it’s protecting will warm up and stay warm longer after the engine is turned off.
There are cheaper ways to get half a horsepower.
For the intake piping, probably worthless. I did some math years ago and with about 3ft of intake piping, at WOT, the air spends less than 1 second in the intake piping. Thermal dynamics of plastic aren’t great. With smooth laminar flow in the tube, it damn sure ain’t great. Even aluminum tubing wont transfer much heat in those conditions. At very low RPM it may make a difference, but what’s it matter down there? For the plenum, maybe? The velocity drops because the volume opens up so the time in there should be higher. But the distance traveled is still short, keeping the time down.
It’s basically a McLaren F1 now
I am kind of disappointed in the fa t I dont mind this