I just barely got finished. I started around 10:30AM and it's now 11:32PM. About an hour of that was for lunch, and about two hours for dinner. That's still 10 hours to install the dang thing.
Here's the antenna mount finished up:
After I got the antenna all sorted out, I thought the A-pillar bracket wouldn't be much trouble. Boy was I wrong! While I understand the simplicity of just riveting on the bracket to the A-pillar over the trim piece, I find it a terrible idea in the long run. When you end up replacing the windshield again, you'd have to drill out the rivets and then rivet it back in place. And of course you'll need to do that yourself because I would not trust anyone else to do it properly, half the time they can't even pop trim off without breaking something. In addition I personally have coax cable running up that side under the A-pillar trim and I need to be able to service it if the need arises, plus I may route wires up that side for lights.
So my bright idea was to use rivnuts and bolt it in place instead. Which was a great idea, except for the little issue of there being a reinforcing tube right behind the location you drill into the A-pillar for the bracket, and it's only about 1/8" away from the part you drill into. So there is zero room to put a rivnut in. And of course I discovered this after I had already drilled the pilot holes and enlarged one of them. I ended up having to shift everything over by 1/4" and redrilling the holes in the A-pillar, the trim piece, and the snorkel bracket. Then on top of that since I didn't have a rivnut setting tool I was just using the technique of threading a nut onto a bolt and then threading the bolt into the rivnut after inserting it into the hole, then holding the bolt in place and turning the nut to set the rivnut. This was a great idea and worked really well for the first two but then the third one the rivnut ended up spinning, even though I was using some engine assembly lube to try and keep it from galling the threads and to help everything move properly. I ran off to Harbor Freight to pick up a rivnut setting tool, but that was just to find out theirs only does standard threads and the rivnuts I had bought were metric (since everything else on the car is metric I wanted to keep with that). So that was a nice waste of time, though I did pick up another box of nitrile gloves, I had run out a few weeks ago.
Fortunately I remembered how I was really supposed to be doing it, which involved using a piece of bar stock with a hole drilled in it and positioning that between the rivnut and the nut you're turning. That way it's impossible for the rivnut to start spinning. So I just used the bracket and threaded a bolt into one of the other holes to hold it in place and finished setting the last rivnut, and then checked to make sure the other two were set correctly.
Rivnuts set, you can see the mistakes that were made...
Setting the last rivnut:
Bracket is installed. Notice how suddenly it's dark out. That's just how my day was going today.
And here is the spacer I made to go between the A-pillar and the trim. I used the RTV I was going to be using to seal the air box to glue the spacer to the trim so that I won't have to fuss around with positioning it when installing/removing the trim. I also used the RTV to seal off the speed holes I put in the A-pillar. The rivnuts were installed with some gasket maker on them to seal up the metal, and then the bolts had thread sealant applied to them to help prevent water seepage. I did end up replacing those heax head screws with some button head stainless steel ones, since I ended up having to make a run to Lowes later (right before they were closing no less).
I thought that with that done the last major hurdle was over and the rest of it would be all downhill. Well, it sure went downhill after that...
The rivets they provide are nice stainless steel ones, but as it turns out, you have to have a super heavy duty rivet setter to be able to use the 3/16" shank stainless steel rivets they give you. I ended up blowing apart my nice, hardly used, pivoting head rivet setter on the first rivet, and it never even set it all the way.
So I had to run to Lowes to buy a new rivet setter and some 3/16" shank aluminum rivets. So include the rivet gun, I also had to buy a 4 inch hole saw, and a set of step drills to do this install. That cost me over $100 in additional/replacement tools just to install this thing. I better get another 20HP with the trouble and expense this snorkel has caused.
All told, if I were to do this again, I probably would, but only because now I know what I need to do differently, and then it wouldn't take me over 10 hours to do it. There's an awful lot of gotcha's though that you have to watch out for. For starters, don't bother trying to unscrew the antenna until you've cut off the end of the plastic cover so that you can see where you need to use an angle grinder or bastard file to remove the staked part. Then you might be able to unscrew it. If not, plan on just braking off the antenna and drilling it out.
Another gotcha is if you're going to just rivet on the A-pillar bracket, that's fine but know that you'll have a pain to deal with the next time you need to replace your windshield. If you elect to use rivnuts like I did to make it easily removable, redrill the holes in the bracket 1/4" over FIRST, then mark the holes for the trim and drill the pilot holes using the new locations.
Lastly, ditch the stainless steel rivets for the air box portion, aluminum is more than strong enough, and make sure to use the washers for the rivets so that they don't accidentally pull through the plastic. Oh, and make sure to center the adapter on the air box, it fits fine height wise, but width wise it has over a 1/4" of play for some reason. I centered it first and clamped it in place with some 6" mini quick clamps, drilled the top and bottom holes, and then the side holes. When I riveted it together I started with the top and bottom holes first again, and then riveted the side holes. I also used a judicious amount of the red RTV sealant since I didn't have any of the sipaflex or whatever sealant they say to use. I went around it on the outside afterwards to make sure it was sealed up everywhere and to cover over the rivets so that water can't get in through them either.
Those were the three big gotcha's I had to deal with when installing the snorkel. If you plan for those then it shouldn't be a big deal to install it in a few hours or so. I spent a lot of time trying to locate tools to fix stuff along the way and working through the issues I ran into. Otherwise it's a pretty simple and quick job.
You'll get a photo of it installed tomorrow when it's light out. I need to shower and go to bed...
