After 3 weeks of hard work I figured I would document my custom DIY carbon fiber snorkel build for inspiration and learning experience for others down the road. I have all of this fairly detailed in my build thread, but you wouldn't know to look in there if you dont come across it so I'm starting a new thread just for the snorkel.
Background
1. I am 2015 tacoma front end swapped with +3" McNeil racing bulge fiberglass tacoma fenders. This means I don't have an off the shelf snorkel mount available
2. I don't have fender liners so my airbox inlet is completely exposed above my tire, I kick up a ton of dust and mud when I wheel right in there and have to do some significant filter cleaning every time.
3. I love the snorkel look and have always wanted to install one since I got the 4runner. Will it ever seen deep enough water crossings? Maybe, maybe not. but at least i wont be kicking up dust and mud right into my intake box through the fender.
4. Probably the main reason... I love carbon fiber. I have an unreasonable fascination with it lol.
The process
I knew that my first step to the process would be to fiberglass a base plate the closely mimics the fender shape and has some sort of a tube outlet to connect to the rest of the piping coming from the airbox. This process was very straight forward and required taping off the fender and glassing right over it to get the shape right. Once this cured I traced out and trimmed the general outline of what I envisioned this to look.
Because PVC piping was cheap and readily available in the size I wanted, that is the route I went. So the next step was to fuse in a portion of pvc that I would later be able to connect a transition to inside the fender. At this point I also drilled a few mounting holes and glassed in some screws to be able to mount from inside the fender as well. I screwed this up a bit by not doing it on the car and they came out point slightly off into incorrect directions, but it wasn't terrible and I made it work.
Then the real fun began.. My first thought was to also use some PVC piping for the upper runner to save myself some work and later wrap it in carbon fiber. After heading and shaping the pipe a few round I got it to where it was close to the shape I wanted. After struggling with getting it mounted and connected to the base I quickly scrapped the idea and picked up some metal duct tubing that I thought I would use in the same fashion. Quickly after, I had an epiphany... 2 part expanding foam.. I've seen it used multiple times in custom projects and this was my time to give it a go.
I used the metal ducting to get the route shape I wanted, and poured the foam into it. It worked like a charm. Next step would be to foam up from the fiberglass base I made and to fuse the 2 together. This was a lot easier than I expected. I used some skewers to stick the upper runner in place and fused the 2 together with more foam and then went to town with a saw to rough shape my cake looking snorkel before turning to 60 grit sand paper to quickly shape the snorkel.
After sanding, and more sanding, I had the shape close to what I thought was going to be good, so the step was to apply some dry wall spackling and sand it smooth to get rid of large imperfections before wrapping the entire thing in some fiberglass cloth.
With the fiberglass cured over the foam, I cut the back side in a straight line and peeled the fiberglass off of the foam. This was easy because it was very thin still. The hard part would be to now fuse the outer fiberglass to the baseplate. I used some hot glue to get it roughed in and then went back to more fiberglass.
I screwed this process up a bit and mounted the baseplate slightly off from where it should have been which at the end would result in me having a slight fender to snorkel base gap that could have been prevented with a bit more care.
Once the 2 pieces were fused I added another layer of fiberglass to strengthen it up a bit and then turned to fiberglass reinforced body filler to go over the entire thing. This is where all the hours of sanding began... sanding, filling, sanding, refilling, sanding some more, until I got the finish to a reasonable condition. The next step would be to go over the bondoglass with some regular body filler and repeat the sanding process.
after multiple days and many hours of sanding I was ready to wrap it in my honeycomb carbon fiber. This process involved using some black dye mixed into the epoxy resin to hide the color underneath, letting it get tacky before laying over the carbon fiber fabric.
I went over the carbon fiber fabric with 3 or 4 layers of resin, with painstaking 14 hour cure times in between, with some light sanding to get rid of the high spots between each layer. With the resin fully built up I went back to sanding, and sanding and sanding, and then sanding some more, adding some more resin, and sanding some more.
When I got the surface finish near-perfect, I did a test mount on the car, and came to a horrid conclusion that I made it too tall and stupid looking. After an evening of pure disappointment, I woke up the next day motivated for some reason, and took to the snorkel with a saw and cut out a 6-7" section, fused the 2 pieces back together, filled it again with bondo glass, repeated the sanding process a few times, filled it with body filler, and went over again with some resin, did a bit more sanding. And was finally happy with the results.
Prior to clear coat, I painted the back and edges black (since the back can't be seen my carbon fiber work there wasn't perfect, its hard to wrap everything in a nice 1-piece sheet when its got so many curves). In order to make this look a bit more presentable, I dyed my clear coat with the same black dye, and slowly blended in the back and up around the edges with multiple passes to give it a slight darkened transition.
After the clear cured, it was off to another few hours of went sanding and buffing the snorkel before it was completely done in a nice mirror finish.
For my mounting system, I used some aluminum angle that I riveted to the A-pillar, and 2 M8 screws that I fused into the snorkel runner itself. Not the nicest looking but it works.
I'm including many pictures from the process to hopefully inspire other to take on custom projects, its a lot of hard work with long hours, but the end result is quite satisfying.
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