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Hey guys! So I'm sure a lot of you have seen the HUGE thread that Dave_Si started (click here), anticipating the launch of our then, forthcoming cold air intake. Well, last Thursday we finally launched the CURL CONTROL system, so it seemed only appropriate to create an official thread for it. Please feel free to post questions, installed pictures, dyno graphs, etc. in this thread. If it gets sidetracked, we'll probably edit out unrelated posts to keep it mostly limited to Q&A, testimonials, pics, and graphs. A lot of times when vendors post new products, they copy/paste the text from their site and call it a day. I'm certainly guilty of it. Instead, I'm going to use the space below to kind of explain the design process and choices that made this kit what it is. My hope is that by explaining our goals for the kit, you may appreciate the motives and emotions that went into the design a bit more.
Click Here to View On Our Site and Purchase
So we started contemplating building a cold air intake (CAI) kit in mid 2016. We knew roughly how to execute the kit, but it wasn't clear to us WHY we were going to build a CAI. When I say "why," I don't mean in the sense of why a business might make something for profit. The motives there are clear. To understand why we'd ask ourselves "why", you have to understand that we really don't have a desire to design products where we don't believe we can make an impact. There's nothing to be passionate about; we prefer problems that inspire us. While ACUITY is a business, for us, it's also the opportunity to make the automotive community better while doing what we love every day. So for us to commit to making a CAI, we needed to find our "why." Below shows the OE intake manifold kit (shown left), and the RBC (or similar) intake manifold kit (shown right)
Making more power is easy. Hold on...don't flip out, I'm going to qualify that statement, haha. Through diligent analysis and testing, there is almost always a gain to be found. The gains get harder to come by as the design improves, so you generally don't start the design knowing if you can beat out a competitor by 0.5hp or 10hp. Power, however, is an obvious goal though for something like this. We wanted a better reason. Ultimately, we decided that if we were going to build a kit, it would be the most well-integrated kit we could offer at the price point we were aiming for. So we started to design a kit, but our "why" was a bit too general. It didn't have actual achievable goals attached to it. After we'd figured out the intake geometry through diligent computer-based analysis and successive dyno testing, we moved onto material selection and chassis integration. The tubing was going to be aluminum, and the whole thing just lacked soul. We weren't interested. We realized that we needed a manufacturing process that would give us more flexibility with geometry. This inevitably led us to the use of carbon fiber. It gave us design freedoms not afforded by aluminum tubing. We wanted to make something people hadn't seen before. So we drew from our personal histories in racing and chose spread tow fabric; (the checkerboard pattern on the intake), which is often a go-to for structural applications like monocoques.
Typically on carbon hoods and things like that, manufacturers like to mold nuts into the parts. This often creates long-term problems as the hardware doesn't always bond on well. Instead, we opted for aluminum appointments, carefully bonded on to the carbon to provide a mounting point and MAF mounting feature. A rubber isolation mount goes between the chassis and the stainless steel bracket that supports the carbon to help protect the intake from shocks and to help it move with the engine as load is applied.
Click Here to View On Our Site and Purchase
So we started contemplating building a cold air intake (CAI) kit in mid 2016. We knew roughly how to execute the kit, but it wasn't clear to us WHY we were going to build a CAI. When I say "why," I don't mean in the sense of why a business might make something for profit. The motives there are clear. To understand why we'd ask ourselves "why", you have to understand that we really don't have a desire to design products where we don't believe we can make an impact. There's nothing to be passionate about; we prefer problems that inspire us. While ACUITY is a business, for us, it's also the opportunity to make the automotive community better while doing what we love every day. So for us to commit to making a CAI, we needed to find our "why." Below shows the OE intake manifold kit (shown left), and the RBC (or similar) intake manifold kit (shown right)
Making more power is easy. Hold on...don't flip out, I'm going to qualify that statement, haha. Through diligent analysis and testing, there is almost always a gain to be found. The gains get harder to come by as the design improves, so you generally don't start the design knowing if you can beat out a competitor by 0.5hp or 10hp. Power, however, is an obvious goal though for something like this. We wanted a better reason. Ultimately, we decided that if we were going to build a kit, it would be the most well-integrated kit we could offer at the price point we were aiming for. So we started to design a kit, but our "why" was a bit too general. It didn't have actual achievable goals attached to it. After we'd figured out the intake geometry through diligent computer-based analysis and successive dyno testing, we moved onto material selection and chassis integration. The tubing was going to be aluminum, and the whole thing just lacked soul. We weren't interested. We realized that we needed a manufacturing process that would give us more flexibility with geometry. This inevitably led us to the use of carbon fiber. It gave us design freedoms not afforded by aluminum tubing. We wanted to make something people hadn't seen before. So we drew from our personal histories in racing and chose spread tow fabric; (the checkerboard pattern on the intake), which is often a go-to for structural applications like monocoques.
Typically on carbon hoods and things like that, manufacturers like to mold nuts into the parts. This often creates long-term problems as the hardware doesn't always bond on well. Instead, we opted for aluminum appointments, carefully bonded on to the carbon to provide a mounting point and MAF mounting feature. A rubber isolation mount goes between the chassis and the stainless steel bracket that supports the carbon to help protect the intake from shocks and to help it move with the engine as load is applied.
