Are Aftermarket Air Intakes Worth It?

Want to make your car have an aggressive throaty rumble exhaust sound via a small remote control when it is driving? Well, an electric exhaust cutout kit is absolutely a great choice for you. Today I will show you the compositions of the electric exhaust cutout kit to make your car’s DIY work easier.

After market intakes, everybody wants them, but why? Well, it can be a good way to make a few extra horsepower, make a little bit more noise, and it gives you something nice to look at in your engine bay.

Today I am gonna show you how to install an aftermarket intake and along the way. We will break down what an intake really is, and we will talk about a few different styles of intakes along with some pros and cons. So you can pick the right intake for yourself. Let’s do it.

So, what is an intake system?

When air gets into here from intake pipe, as much air as the engine needs right into this little black box. It enters through this snorkel, which is fed air from over here. It is just reaching for colder air because the air box itself is mounted right next to the exhaust manifold, which makes a lot of hot air. So cooler air is more dense and denser sir has more oxygen in it, which means we can make more power. But that air needs to be clean. So, it is forced through a flat paper air filter in here.

So once the air is all sucked up and filtered, how does the engine know what to do with it? In the case of this Miata and many other cars, we have a mass air flow meter, which is the thing that actually does the measuring of how much air is flowing into the engine. So, it can tell the fuel injectors just how many fuels to squirt, along with telling a bunch of other stuff what to do.

Lots of cars nowadays will have MAP sensor, which stands for manifold absolute pressure, which means basically it has a pressure sensor in the intake manifold it, then it tells the engine how many airs is in there.

All right, so why do we upgrade our intake system? Well, in theory it will allow for an increase in airflow in your engine, which means that you can make more power and since your engine is not gonna be working as hard to suck air in, you can also gain a little fuel economy.

And the filters that aftermarket intakes tend to use usually tend to last a lot longer because they can be cleaned and reused. They also tend to look nicer than the stock intake, and they most definitely sound mad better!

So why might you not wanna upgrade your intake? Well, for one, if your engine is stock, your stock intake is probably not really much of a restriction. They are pretty well designed for flow these days, especially because that is linked to fuel economy, but it is also important to know that adding an intake might also make it so your car will not pass smog, which is a big deal in some places like California. And if you have a newer car that still has a warranty, you might void that too. So, you have gotta think about that.

Okay, so you are convinced you wanna upgrade. There are a couple of different types you can go with each with some pros and cons. The two primary designations are a Cold Air Intake and a Short Ram Intake.

So why might you not wanna upgrade your intake? Well, for one, if your engine is stock, your stock intake is probably not really much of a restriction. They are pretty well designed for flow these days, especially because that is linked to fuel economy, but it is also important to know that adding an intake might also make it so your car will not pass smog, which is a big deal in some places like California. And if you have a newer car that still has a warranty, you might void that too. So, you have gotta think about that.

Okay, so you are convinced you wanna upgrade. There are a couple of different types you can go with each with some pros and cons. The two primary designations are a Cold Air Intake and a Short Ram Intake.

So this thing is short with one nice smooth bend for as little restriction as possible while still trying to place the filter in the best location available in the Miata’s engine bay. In our Miata currently, we just need to get it away from where it is.

You can see that where the Miata outs its filter is right on top of the exhaust header. That means there is a lot of heat there and hot air means less oxygen, which means less power, which is obviously bad.

So, we just turn the filter around, which is much better with a lot less heat, a lot more oxygen and more power.

And these things last pretty much forever because you can clean them and reuse them. So, this thing is actually kind of an interesting little intake because it is again, not really a cold air or a short ram. Though short ram intake is what it says. It’s short.

A short ram is just trying to remove as much restriction as possible to let the engine gulp in more air into the throttle body. But what if you want less heat and more power, right? Well, you can go cold air intake.

They are designed to totally relocate the air filter with some longer, more intricate aluminum piping and they will put the filter as far away from heat as possible like in the fender well or behind the front bumper. With the filter being relocated to these areas, they become more prone to getting caked up with dirt and picking up road debris.

Like if you drive through a really deep puddle or a kitty pool, it is possible to suck enough water up in your engine to hydrolock it.

So, there is a potential downside to the pretty aluminum intake pipes we have been talking about. You might actually lose a little bit of throttle response or even a little bit of torque somewhere by replacing your factory pipes. You see this chamber over here, this little chamber of secrets, that is what is called a Helmholtz Resonance Chamber, and a lot of factory intakes have this in some form or another.

It is pretty interesting. What it does is it kinda acts like a shock absorber, cushioning all the airwaves in the intake and smoothing out flow, which is good. It can also, if it is tuned correctly to the engine, it can act a little bit like a spring and propel air into the combustion chamber, in just the right time to make more power. It also cancels out a little bit of noise, which is not very awesome, but it is very smart. And for two of those reasons, we have gonna let it stay.

All right, Now I am gonna install the Air Intake Kit to my Miata. I have got some stuff taken apart. Anytime that is the case, it is not a bad idea to do a little cleaning while you are in there. All right, we need to remove our cruise control actuator, which looks like two more little bots. So, we are just pulling off the cruise control actuator here, because we need to relocate it for our new intake.

So that is about how it is gonna sit. So, we have got this upper support that goes down to the frame rail here. We will reuse one of our original bolts to hold it in place. And then this support goes to our suspension hardware, and we will just keep it nice in place.

All right, that is it. An intake is installed. Now we can drive it to see if it sounds better. It must be great? So, thank you today for your watching . See you next time.