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Suzuki Alto Works – Intake Experiment

I like turbo cars a lot. You open the intake up, and they make great noises. I wanted more noise from the Alto, but didn’t want to pay much.

So what does one do if they want to try a cheap intake, and not import a brand name one from Japan? Hello Supercheap.

The stock intake setup is surprisingly open, with a duct taking air from under the bonnet lip, feeding it through a (currently duct tape) pipe to the top of the airbox, where I have a Greddy panel filter. It goes through this filter, through a pipe and down into the intake of the turbo. Nothing in the way, no real restrictions.

But I wanted more noise. Since removing the leaking BOV, I’m back to a quiet little chooo when changing gears and almost no intake noise. In contrast, I have a friend with an S660 fitted with an HKS intake and that thing makes all the good noises.

So, I went out and bought some bits. A pod filter on clearance, a 76mm 45 degree alloy pipe, and a 51mm-76mm reducer hose.

I started by removing the airbox. This is pretty straightforward by disconnecting the intake pipe and breather, and removing the two bolts

Then with some fiddling, I jammed the new contraption into place

The filter is massive. Not even kidding, it’s almost as big as the engine itself.

It took a lot of stuffing around, and a couple of different revisions of the mounting bracket, to get to this point, where the filter had some clearance from the strut brace

This was not enough clearance though…

What I hadn’t really accounted for was just how much the engine moves under load. Normal driving was fine, but under boost or high loads the engine must tip back a bit more and suddenly the filter was banging its life out on the strut brace, sounding like the car was coming to pieces.

So, other than that, was it worth it? No. I swear the car felt less responsive down low, and the noises were disappointing. The turbo discharge noise on gear changes was excellent, almost as loud as the BOV was, but the actual intake sucking noises really didn’t… suck.

Under boost, or load, when you think it would be sucking the most air and real loud, it made no noise. When you were at a steady speed, around 100kph, with minimal throttle, the damn thing would emit a loud sucking noise. You could induce it with certain throttle positions, but it never really made noises when I wanted it to. I got fairly sick of the noise on the open road at cruise.

So, back to the stock intake I went, glad I didn’t waste money importing an intake from Japan. I’ll find another use for this filter at some point.

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