If you don’t already know, a Poor Man’s Intake is essentially finding a cheap method of opening up the Intake of your vehicle, the portion pulling air into the engine, in order to give it a better sound and a little extra torque. In my particular case, I found that my fuel consumption seemed to be better, not to mention the increased acceleration which was a lot of fun to have. Within this guide I will give a brief description oh how I did the Poor Man’s Intake on my Yaris that I used to own, while explaining a bit about some more complex methods used by others. Given my own experience with car modification is limited, I feel this is something that can be easily pulled off by others
My Version – Simple and Sweet
Now I owned a 2008 Yaris Sedan, so if you happen to have the same model, you can do it the same way I did which was incredibly simple. First step is to locate the intake itself if you don’t already know what it is or what it looks like. Try searching some Google images (a lot of intakes look similar) then locate the box underneath the hood of your car. While I’m explaining this being done on the Yaris specifically, I’ve seen the exact same method applied on many other cars like a Honda Civic for one so it is likely you’re model of car won’t be vastly different.
In this case, the intake of the Yaris when popped open consists of a pair of filters that the air is pulled through, from a much smaller port that comes out the top portion. One of these will have a sensor and be attached to the side proceeding towards the engine of the car while the second should be in the upper portion when popped off. In my case all I did was pull out the second filter and use the metal hooks to keep it propped open. Now I fully realize that someone is going to call me out for being whack for pulling off something that low class, but I would contest this worked wonderfully over a year and a half of heavy driving without causing any problems whatsoever.
The only drawback here was the occasional slipping of one of the clips that kept would occasionally make the opening a bit smaller and the more expensive sensor attached filter getting dirty a little faster. The benefits here is it took practically 5 minutes to do, and you can literally pull over to a gas station and either implement this or put the second filter back, closing the intake up if you’d rather keep your filters lasting a little longer on a long drive.
Some Other Examples
Now many other examples I’ve found, mostly online, seem to take it a bit further by actually modifying the case of the intake itself to make it a little less dingy or Ghetto rather. I would suggest having a base level of understanding before actually cutting out parts of your intake since you can more easily damage something you’re going to have to pay to fix. These methods still follow the same concept however, just making a bigger hole to pull air through the filters and into the engine. By no means should you ever have a space where air can pass around the filter and into the engine as this will be disastrous.