Hot air

["B Shuler" <ypp86w@domain.elided>]

Ghaham Hilder is rightly skeptical of claims that routing cooler outside air 
to the intake will produce power increases on the order of 13 percent.  He 
summarizes the discussion to date and asks for any empirical evidence to 
support claimed improvements.

Oddly, yesterday I was killing time at the magazine rack of the grocery 
store and saw an article in the current issue of CarCraft magazine where 
just such an experiment was conducted on their beater '68 Sattelite.  Along 
with other low to no-buck mods they mounted a coffee can scoop under the 
front bumper and ran a flexible four or five inch dryer vent tube straight 
into the air cleaner.  Before and after runs with that modification alone at 
the drag strip showed a measurable improvement of 0.13 seconds to just under 
18 seconds ET. While ET is not a direct measurement of horsepower, and a 
Detroit iron v-8 is not an Alfa, the modest seven-tenths of one percent 
improvement jibes with my own experience better than some of the more 
fantastical notions previously offered.

Given Ghaham's taste for measurment over speculation as in his excellent 
previous post on valve springs, I look forward to hearing of any experiments 
along the same lines with Alfa engines.  I would actually be very surprized 
indeed to see ten percent improvement but only a test can truly tell.

Bryan Shuler
Austin TX






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