Pyromania Industries' guide to build a DIY snorkel for your car

Howdy folks! It's not your favorite pyromaniac writing this blog entry but his good friend your friendly neighborhood cryptid, wendigo cultist and subterranean creature. Today, we're gonna learn how to build a snorkel for your Gambler 500 rig, your new off-roader or just a car you might wanna take through a deep puddle or two!

For this demonstration, we'll be building the snorkel onto my car for this year's Gambler 500; he's a 1996 Honda Civic hatchback Wendigo Cultist edition named Zouzab. Say hi to Zouzab!

Let's get down to business. First thing you'll want to do when building the snorkel is locate your intake. 

As you can see, this intake happens to be below water height if you're taking a spirited drive through a road that happens to cross a river or two.

We'll begin solving this problem by drilling a hole through the body lined up to the center of your air intake, starting with a small hole for reference and then expanding it to a size slightly larger than the diameter of your air intake using a hole saw or other suitable tool.

Like so.

Make sure to drill all the way through! If there's important things in the way, ~simply move them~

Now that that's done, you'll want to take out the tube for your preexisting air intake and measure it's diameter. After that, pop to your nearest hardware store and grab at least six feet or so of the next closest size of ABS tubing, along with a 90 degree elbow, a 1/2 degree hub and a coupler to connect the original intake tube and the snorkel bits. Alongside these goodies, make sure to grab some tape, ABS slow solvent cement, all round steel strapping and some self-drilling screws that'll fit the holes in the strapping.

Following this little trip, you'll want to continue by removing the intake tube from the engine bay and sealing any preexisting holes along it with tape. You won't be needing those anymore.

Next thing you'll wanna do is reinstall the intake tube, mount your coupler to it and make sure it fits the ABS tubing you bought. Then you'll need to make a couple measurements; specifically, the length of any extra tubing you might need to connect the coupler to the elbow, the length of tube needed to connect the elbow protruding from the vehicle to the 1/2 degree hub and the length of tube you want past the hub, which will get you to your ideal air intake height.

You can cut these sections using any old tool, but if you're an absolute gigachad you'll utilize a plastic pipe cutter, like this one our favorite flamethrower enthusiast provided for the job!

After cutting everything to the right size and shape, it's time to start securing it all together, beginning with the coupling and elbow, then the elbow and the intake tube, and so on. This is where we'll be putting that ABS cement to good use. Simply lather a layer of the good stuff onto the connecting portions of each piece, stick 'em together and hold them there firmly for a good 30 seconds, like so:

After you connect the intake tube, you're going to want to keep it supported. Once it's supported, you'll use the steel strapping and screws to mount it into place along the body of the car every foot or so, using the (I had to google this) windscreen pillar to secure the last section of the intake.

Once all the tubing is mounted into place with the steel strapping, you're done! You're ready to send it through puddles, streams or other bodies of water with (slightly) less risk of permanent engine death!

And here's Zouzab in all his water-ready glory; plus a couple extra pictures of his custom paint job.

Now that Zouzab's got a snorkel, the next priority is underbody protection; a skidplate. Unfortunately, we didn't have ramps on hand, which you need to get under a low clearance vehicle like good ol' Zouzab. But here at Pyromania Industries, we're industrious. In a situation like this, the only logical choice is to take your trusty mini excavator and get crackin':

But that's a story for another time.