What an EXCITING DAY!

Well, got day 2 of my vacation kicked off right.

Went down early this morning and started plinking away at stuff on the Dakota. One of the items I had planned to do was a K&N cold air intake. It smooths air coming into the throttlebody, and gives a decent boost in throttle response and power. 


Now, unfortunately, K&N doesn't list a kit for the 3.9 V6. I can understand that, we are talking about a V6 and a 25 year old one at that. I use a few online resources to find parts interchanges, and one of my favorites is Tascaparts.com. Not only do they give you a parts list, but they give an image of assembly, right out of the manual.

What I did is checked here and found that the air intake on the 3.9 was the same as the one on the 5.2, so I ordered a K&N 57 Series FIPK Cold Air Intake Kits 57-1509-1 kit from Summit Racing.




I had to make a slight modification for one of the brackets, and had a fun time routing the crankcase vent hose, but other than that, it was bolt on.


The manifold to intake tube bracket had to bent an additional 30 degrees. I clamped it to my work bench, and just bent it until it sat where I needed it to.


The instructions tell you to bolt it to the bolt that holds down the fuel rail, but the one on the V6 is too far back. I used the bracing strut bolt, and used my drill with a step bit to enlarge the hole on the metal bracket.

So, now it's all installed, nice and tight, and you can already feel the difference in throttle response.

Next I decided to tackle the seat. Yesterday, I found that 2 of the 4 stock springs had pulled the holes through, and basically the basket was not supporting the driver any longer.

Using my metal step bit, I redrilled the 2 holes and then added a 5th. I picked up 3 inch springs and used those to mount up the seat. 



That looked like it would work, so I moved onto fixing the seat. I had intended to add an inch of upholstery foam to the seat, under the driver, so I ran to Joann's picked up a yard of black burlap, a pack of 1x15x17 upholstery foam, and grabbed 3m 77 spray adhesive.

To start, I had to reattach the old foam back together.
I used the 77 to spray were all the foam had torn. I then pulled the sides in with duct tape to hold it while it was drying.


I let that sit for an hour, to fully cure, and then removed the duct tape, and cut a sheet of burlap to cover the bottom of the cushion. I also found a small tear on the cover, so used burlap on the back end of that to patch it, and keep it from tearing further.

This should help hold the seat foam together and protect it from the springs. I took the seat cushion and reinstalled it. That was probably the most difficult part of this process. I was only able to get the back tabs secure, as the seat just sits too low to the floorplan to get my big ass hamhocks in there to pull it all back in. Next weekend, as we want to do a deep clean on the carpets, G and I will pull the whole seat. We can fix the cover at that time, and also work on the seat belt end that needs to be looked at.

I finished up the day installing the K&N FIPK on the wife's Durango, which seriously only took like 45 minutes. 

Got to love those bolt on power adds.


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