Well this is going to be the final post on the DIY stuff for a while.
Honey Badger is back together and has been driving AWESOME.
Here, I'll detail a few things that got me good and hopefully will save someone some trouble.
The biggest issue was lack of instructions. Sure, if you're a mechanic, that's cool. As a mechanic, things that are alien to a noob hobbyist starting out are obvious and common sense. Like how to fit pipes together, where they are located on the engine, where things fit into, where there are o-rings and not, how C clips should look like, etc.
None of that stuff was obvious to me and so I ended up doing some learning and put the car back together and apart 3 times before sorting out issues that I could have avoided had I known these things at first.
The biggest ones are
1. Prior to installing FMIC and charge / boost pipes on the car, fit the pipes to the FMIC, with the C-clips, try to pull them off with all your might, and if they are clipped in properly, take visual note of how the pipes LOOK on the FMIC, which will make life easier when you're under the car.
In my case, I had the charge pipe on and it appeared to be clipped in properly, was flush to the little stub pipe on fmic, but then popped off when I went for a test drive. So, I stepped back, removed FMIC and both pipes, and did #1 above. Which then helped me realize that lower charge pipe needed to go about 2mm further over the FMIC stub pipe, not be flush with it. However, the lower boost pipe looks different and is more flush with FMIC pipe!
And, this will be probably different in many combinations of brands, etc. So I think the most important is to fit the pipes to FMIC outside of the car, with clips, and understand how they will look when properly fit and clipped in.
Which led me to..
2. Leave all clamps and rubber tubing to be the last thing that you get tightened. Get the top and bottom fitment down and make sure C clips are in all the way before tightening lower and upper pipes together with the clamps and rubber tubing.
The most important is to make sure the pipe at top end fits to the engine and clips in correctly, and that at the bottom end, it fits into the FMIC and cannot be yanked off when clipped in (this goes for both boost and lower charge pipe).
Essentially get the pipes to fit correctly at their ends, and then working the rubber tubing and clamps to fit the lower to upper charge pipe, or the lower boost pipe (small metal piece) to the upper boost pipe, is actually really easy, if not tedious. Also ratchet wrench makes tightening those clamps about 50x faster.
Also,
3. Use a diagram to understand what parts should exist and go where. Before doing any work!
Again, no instructions with any of this stuff makes for a lot of guess work for a noob. I knew from reading some threads that the top charge pipe has an o-ring that needs to go on the VRSF charge pipe.
However, I didn't realize that there were 3 more o-rings, one at each other end of each pipe. I missed those at first, which accounted for another test drive and back to the drawing board session. The diagram on real-oem (attached) shows clearly there are 4 o-rings, 3 of which I missed the first time around. See #9 and #10 on the attached diagram.
Last but not least, this was not a big deal to figure out but I did have to look it up --
The stock pipes have these plastic pieces that hold the C-clip on the outside of the pipe. I wasn't sure if those get re-used or not, which made breaking them an uncertain ordeal. And getting those C-clips off of the stock pipe completely without breaking the plastic was pretty much impossible.
Luckily, you don't need the plastic part, just the metal C clip, for the aftermarket pipes.
Those are most of the gotchas.
One other trick I found helpful was to put some masking tape on the top boost pipe, to mark the center of where the C clip should go. This made it much easier since it's a tight space there and can be hard to see.
Driving the car is so awesome now and feels great to know I did it and didn't take it to a shop!