What is the purpose of the intake manifold brace?
 

Seriously does it serve any purpose other then to make filter changes a mission and a half?

I am about to rip it the hell out and toss it into the nearest body of water.

it does exactly what you described.

I used it to hammer a nail in a wall to hang a picture once. Couldn't find my hammer.

You still have it in?
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I would have removed mine sooner if I had known it did nothing. Though I never really had any issues with it changing the filter, just had to kind of scratch your arms up a little, but car work isn't free of pain. Mine never went back on during the rebuild and I haven't missed it.

ive heard stories of people taking it out and something with the throttle/ cable/ braket breaks. and for others it does nothing. i guess its like a 1.6L diff. could blow up under stock power, or could hold alot more.. just whatever it feels like doing on that day.

Yeah.

Gonna take it out this Saturday. I barely got my filter off with it there, and then barely got it on.

Do you guys try to go from the top to reach the filter or something? From the bottom it's a piece of cake, even with my Hustler-sized massive forearms.

I left mine in. without the top bolts. dar.

So awesome without it, I can reach the filter from any angle now.

If that dude who thought it was a good idea was still alive id fist him with this thing.

^cant believe u still had this thing in there... now i dont wanna hear any complaints bout oil changes no mo, mmmk

Don't remove it. That is one of the reasons Emilio's throttle body plate/flapper screw came loose/broke and almost went through the motor. :-o
If I were you, I'd leave it in unless there is a reason you can't (oil cooler lines or something).

its 3 bolts to get that thing out, takes an extra what 3 min to do an oil change? I leave mine in for that reason alone. If emilio hadn't i said anything about it would be in the car. So it probably wont do anything if you took it out, but why chance it since its so easy to remove?

How sure can we be that Emilio's incident can be blamed on a lack of IM brace?

How can the brace possibly cause any problems with the TB? It's at least 6 inches away from it.
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Refresher on the incident?

I'm with coaster... Please explain or link to the incident. :D

I'nm really not seeing the coorilation here...remove that shit and never look back...never:sadwavey:

mine's been removed for nearly 10 years.

Last time I heard about a screw coming out of a throttle body butterfly and going through an engine was Braineack trying to find weight savings.

If anything the brace is just another case of over engineering on mazdas part.

Its definitely not a load bearing piece.

lol at weight savings.

Honestly, I thought I remembering reading that the piece had something to do with helping with vibrations and what not...definetly nothing to do with the tb.

I'm willing to bet the rigidity of the IM stays the same with or without the brace.

never heard of any failure directly related to it, and im sure more than 50% of the m.net members have their brace removed.

I agree.

In order to help any with rigidity it needs to have tension on it, which it does not.

anyone measured the amount the intake manifold moves relative to the block at all RPM conditions? because it probably does a little. And aluminum SUCKS at fatigue resistance. just a mm or two of shake will break stuff fast.

the dsms have a very similar brace which i removed from my car with no issues at all, however my buddy removed it and his manifold literally fell off during a hard launch.
i think the only difference was that he had his coils mounted to the manifold like they are stock and i had cops. maybe the extra weight on it did it? it left the flange on the head and was hanging from throttle cable and plug wires.

Removed the damn thing from our integra as well when I redid the head. No issues there either.

And 99% of m.net members don't drive their cars hard enough for it to matter. 99% of the members here, too, for that matter. If you routinely rev your motor past 7000rpm, I'd have that thing in. I don't, but only because it doesn't fit.

DaNgEr To MaNiFoLd!!!!!!!!!!!

I removed it on all 3 of my DSMs the first time I ever had to do anything underneath it. Never looked back.

K. If you drive your shit hard, leave it in.

So everyone here, go ahead and take it out.

And how do you not see a correlation between the intake manifold brace and those bolts backing out? Leave the engineering to the engineers, not your puny little brain.

After just watching a video of Savington on the track, and him saying he doesn't have it installed, really leads me to believe that it's going to be just fine without it.

I suppose there could be a resonance, hadn't thought of that. Is the theory that Emilio's TB screw backed out due to the sustained vibration?

BTW - Like I told Sav, I'm not an engineer, or an engineering student, or anything like an engineer. I don't think that makes my brain "puny", kthx. :2cents:

I want it in, though. I tried to leave it in but I need to redo my oil cooler lines to make it fit. If you have room for it, it should be installed.

Ah. Sorry to have misinterpreted your statement then. I won't say that my motor routinely sees 7000+ RPM, but it's seen it on a few occasions. Guess I'll reconsider reinstalling it.

Oil filter relocation...problem solved.

Savington needs to concentrate more on his brakes then intake manifold braces.

mine doesn't fit because of the intake manifold spacer gasket. I need to put one on the bottom of the bracket to space it out accordingly.

Be careful with the intake manifold spacer and no brace. I ran this way on my NA track car. After a lot of abuse on track, three of the intake manifold studs broke, the intake started to suck in air and burned out the #4 piston.

I am now running with the stock intake gasket and the brace. The engine really moves around a lot at 7,000 rpm.

Talking about Saml01, and Philly, and Turbo_4. In response to your first post, we can't be sure, but it makes sense and there is a reason they increased vehicle production costs so that they could have it when designing the motor.

I left mine there...I can get the filter out no prob, and I like being able to put my hand down on intake manifold when working on car without worrying about stress on flange/runners.


And +1 to the above. As smart as engineers are, we are also lazy bastards. No engineer would devote effort to designing a brace if there wasn't some vibration/dynamics issue that made it a good measure.

It may be there just so there's never any problems in a half million miles of use, but some of us (like me) are already half way there, and a lot of the miles I put on my car count double - Sav's count nearly 25:1 -.

If you haven't heard the Miata TB shafts break so often because of vibration. I.e Actor at m.net went through at least 3 OEM TB over the last couple of years.

Cant find anything on this over at m.net.

Also did more searching on the brace, and the majority of the peeps over there seem to be pulling them as well.

One of the threads was started by Emilio - about different options of TB shaft and TB upgrades because of the issue

As mentioned above 99% or the people both here and over there are more wine-and-cheesers than racers.
Btw, Actor's car doesn't even have forced induction on it - it is a dedicated CSP autocrosser machine.

OK, so what about aftermarket intake manifolds? They're not braced and I assume that the same vibrations travel through them.

dude like more than half the people here are engineers, me included lol (well student).

Don't ya know, its a shorty hood prop. Or is it a endless supply of aluminum shims to be cut off with a band saw...

I'd assume (hope) a sheetmetal plenum with velocity stacks weighs a hell of a lot less than the OEM cast setup.

Right, I figured that, but part of the argument seems to be that it helps reduce the vibrations causing problems with the TB, if that's really true anyway.

Engineers aren't always right...


I've had mine off for 4 years now, was one of the very first things I did. Beat the shit out of my car on a daily basis and have yet to see failure. No, its not turbo, but that doesn't matter. I still beat the car like it owes me money.

True. The number of people who have removed this brace is enormous. The number of people within that group with throttle plate issues is miniscule. The cars that are being driven hard enough often enough to develop throttle plate problems like this don't have plenums; the ones that do have plenums aren't driven hard enough to develop them.