Breathing Cooler Air

It's a well known fact that colder air has higher O2 density than hot air.  Hence if we could supply as much cold air as possible into the combustion chamber, we will have a better chance of increasing the power output of the engine.  So that's being the motivation, it's time to look for the best Cold Air Intake (CAI) system available.

After much readings, it seems that the AEM cold air intake is best intake system on the market. Many have proven via dyno result that this system makes the most power of ANY intake system in the market, in comparison with other brands such Iceman, Weapon R, RS Akimoto, PRM, etc. Some of the reasons include how the system was engineered where AEM claimed that they "tunes" the system to each application - the length of the overall tubing, the diameter of the tubing, and the minimal number of bends all work together to make this system create the maximum power from your motor.  In addition, the tubes are ceramic-coated, which reduces the absorption of heat from the engine bay.

So I've decided to go with AEM.  Unfortunately, I 've made a mistake during ordering the correct P/N for the CAI.  There are so many models available in AEM's catalog.  So I thought I should go with the one that is meant for the chasis i.e. 4 door EK.  I ended up with this:

Upon its arrival, I found out that it didn't fit my EK's engine bay.  The design of the pipe requires it to go through a hole at the chasis beam behind the headlight, which my EK doesn't has that.  I can either drill a hole for the pipe to go through, or sell it off and buy the correct one.  I decided to go with the latter, and the AEM CAI fits nicely in my friend's EJ (locally assembled EK i.e. Malaysian Domestic Market or MDM).

Back to AEM catalog, after much studying on the model numbers, I then realized that there is in fact a hybrid unit that is meant for B-series engine transplant into the Civics.  The unit comes in a larger pipe diameter at 3", instead of 2.5" like my previous unit.  It is obvious now that this is the one for me.  How here it is, as it arrived to me:

The good thing about this unit is that it comes with the replacement bracket for the gearbox, so we can discard the bulky and ugly front gearbox bracket, and replace it with the nice and shiny bracket in the bottom left of the above photo.  I'll show you how it looks in the engine bay later on.

The air filter is grey in color instead of white.

This is the Air Bypass Valve, which is meant to avoid the intake system from sucking water into the engine.  If there is an occasion where there is a heavy rain or the car is being driven through a pool of water that the end of the intake is completely submerged, this handy thingy is supposed to let air comes through it (instead of from the end of the pipe) thus avoiding water from being sucked into the engine and kills it.  But I am not going to install it, since I usually don't go trouble myself driving through a pool of water on the road if I see them (although that is sometimes quite hard to avoid in this country by the way).