How Crappy Is Your Air Cleaner?
- Thread starter motorheadmike
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Thanks for posting. I was always under the impression the drop base helped air flow move in a curve up to the carb inlet and therfore flowed better. Glad that got cleared up. I have been running a 14x5 on a drop base, might run an air cleaner lid on a solid base instead, sort of the salad bowl only shorter.
Years ago I had a sheetmetal box that would seal the carb to my cowl hood... Its base was built off of one of those triangle foam filters. It worked really well because it was flat across to the barrels in the main body. Anything that radiuses air smoothly into the carb/throttle body is going to be a benefit, especially if you can gain velocity toward/past the valve.
I had that Dual Snorkle aircleaner for my 440-4 'Cuda. Back in the early 1990's I was all about flipping the lid.
I wish they would have tried a modern, bolt on, down the hole 90 degree bend with hose and a cone K&N, just to see how much HP these can support.
I wish they would have tried a modern, bolt on, down the hole 90 degree bend with hose and a cone K&N, just to see how much HP these can support.
What's missing in that test is the air/fuel mixtures with each filter. Without tweaking the carb for each filter we don't know which filter is best.
If something is sucking 100+ hp, tweaking the air/fuel mixture won't get much of that back.
I've always thought the tiny hats and the fly eyes killed HP and this just confirmed it. Too bad they didn't have one of those 3 butterfly top fuel airfilters that were kool back in the 1980's.
Once they ruled out the restrictive designs, smooth airflow to the carb seemed to make most HP. More airflow, that is providing the air in a turbulent manner, made less HP than Less airflow with smooth air. It's not the quantity, it is the quality.
I think the GM dual snorkels are less restrictive than that Mopar. Olds was thinking with the filter that opened from the top with their forced air setup and probably was part of the reason for the change from the dual snorkel in 1970.
That data really don't mean much to me. It's a 489 CID race engine sucking an ungodly amount of air. They don't start taking data till 4750 RPM and @ 500HP and not seeing much change till 650 HP. Not many of us in that territory. I hope it was the editing because they were showing testing w/ and w/o the 1" spacer. I would like to see some testing in a realistic range, but it was interesting.
They should redo it with a street engine that covers the 250-350 hp range with basic carbs & exhaust. Shame they don't troll this forum to read some of our views/opinions/ramblings on this.
Shoulda coulda woulda. The test was mostly entertainment with some basic perspective. All in all gave a basic idea of which are mega horrible versus which kinda suck. Yes, those are my scientific measurement standards.
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