How To Port & Polish Your Throttle Body
 
 
 
 
 
This Write Up Comes To Us From Cegpcola, Be Sure and Tell Him Thanks!
First off, you wont to disconect all electrical connections as well as all of your vacum and coolant lines running into the throttle body. Following that, you need to disconnect the actual throttle cables. Usually the cable are held in a bracket back down the cable a little ways, loosen the jam nut that hods the cable in the bracket, but make sure that you mark it as best you can so you can keep the same amount of tension on the cable (if not the car will idle at a different RPM, and may have idle problems). Not the cable take a little bit of persuasion, but usually slides out of the side off the throttle body cam. Follow this by removing the bolts that hold the Throttle Body to the manifold, being carefull with the gasket or have another one handy.


Now we have the Throttle body off, and it should look like this:


If you look at the top of the Throttle body, you will notice a passage in front of the butterfly. This is the Idle air control passage, and be warned that you do not want to alter this area at all. It will change the way the car idles, and will lead to the purchase of a brand new throttle body.


In the above picture you can see the rough areas within the Throttle Body that can produce gains by smoothing, as well as how thick the material is, which causes a little step up for the incoming air. Smoothing these areas will produce smoother air flow resulting in mostly quicker throttle response.


If you look closely, you can see my ring of white out that I used to mark where the butterfly sits inside the Throttlebody. This mark will make sure that you are mindfull of the fact that you can not go beyond this point in the Throttle Body. One of the reasons that I make this mark is because I unsrew the Butterfly and remove it for the P&P process, just to give me more room to work inside of the Throttle Body. If you go past this mark be aware that this will allow too much air around the butterfly, and will endup sending you to the dealer to get a new Throttle Body.
Now then we go to work with porting the piece out. I always like to use my dremel with the sanding drums for aluminum. I have noticed that they cut faster, and are less likely to dig into the material.

I always start from the outside and work my way in. So typically I wil knife edge the top, then start working my way into the Throttle Body by smoothing the edges. As you do this, you ultimately smooth all of your edges so that it flows smoothly from the knife edge that you put on the outside edge, all the way to your whiteout line.

Next in line is to start polishing your work. I will start with a rotary faned sanding bit at 180 grit, followed with 400 grit sand paper that I do by hand, ultimately working my way up to 2000 grit which will look like the picture below.


Last step is to take your rotary tools polishing bits and go to work on polishing it to a mirror like finish.


Here are my final results:


AS you can see, I did not port the area around the Idle air control passage, I simply polished this area. I would not recomend even polishing this area unless you know what effects it will have on your cars idle quality.

I hope this has been of some help to you all, and thank you for reading my article.

Write up and Photos by Kurtis ( cegpcola) Bailey


Next, as mentioned above I remove the Butterfly by unscrewing it. Most cars will allow this, although some may very. This for more access to get your grinding wheels into the Throttle Body.
Almost everyone has heard of it, but one UCF member shows you how to do it! A great way to pick up some horses while increasing throttle responce!
Porting Your Throttle Body

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