The Itty Bitty NOVA VW Committee

[SlimKlim]

Continuing the trend of overthinking my front plate mount to the exasperation of you all, I was ruminating on an article I read where APR ran a dyno test with a completely free & clear grill and a grill with a europlate attached to the center of it, and recorded a 16hp/22ft-lb loss due to the spike in intake temperatures. 

http://fourtitude.com/news/aftermarket_t...orsepower/

Looking at the OEM US front plate mount, the lower 3 inches of the damn thing hangs down right in the center of the intercooler. However, off on the passenger's side of the car is some contraption that is covered in smooth black plastic, so I assume whatever it is doesn't need a ton of airflow. 

I took another look at this DIY design: http://forums.vwvortex.com/showthread.ph...late-Mount and figured I could make it work with the GTI despite the differences in the design of the grill. 

That guy posted his files on thingiverse, so Justin grabbed them and shelled one out for me, time was limited so he had to do the mounting plate at a lower quality. 

I test fit it last night and I think it will work well, it's pretty fiddly to install because of the honeycomb pattern of the GTI grill, but otherwise it works pretty well.







He's going to make some adjustments to the design and run one off for me at a higher quality for the final product. Ironically the plate is still stuck on there with Velcro right now because I couldn't get my fingers behind the plate to thread the nuts onto the bolts with the hardware I had, I'll use stubby self tapping screws with the denser 75% infill production quality one.

I was going to ask him to increase the depth of part of the mounting plate to get a little bit more clearance between the license plate and the bumper, but looking at the OG guy's DIY again it looks like he just stuck a couple strips of rubber on there to accomplish the same purpose, I'll probably just do that because I can figure out exactly how much padding to add when I'm putting it together instead of trying to guestimate how much width to add to the plate.



Regardless of the method, adding some padding will allow me to mount the plate an inch or two further to the passenger's side than it is now without rubbing on the painted bumper, and completely out of the way of the intercooler and parking sensors.