I just placed an order for the tubes from your web site and I already have the filters so hopefully the tubes will be in stock soon.
I recently installed a Kenwood DNX9980HD along with the KNA-EC100 that allows me to monitor intake temperature, intake pressure...etc. Temperatures haven't warmed up here in Oregon yet but the testing I have done so far shows the intake temperature only increasing 6 to 8 degrees anytime the car is moving at more than around 20MPH. I was very surprised to see how quickly the intake temperature dropped after sitting idle for a long period of time. With the car at full operating temperature and just sitting, the intake temperature would climb to ~ 110 degrees, but as soon as I start moving it would drop to 63 degrees with an ambient temperature of 56. My background is in mechanical engineering and I have done a lot of work with my companies modeling group where we use CFD (computational fluid dynamics) to predict flow patterns of gas through various pipes and reactor chambers. Due to decades of experience (yes I'm that old) only on rare occasions did we find that our original ideas and thinking about flow patterns were flawed. In looking over the Z intakes, there is very little to improve on here. The air is already drawn from a cold area at the sides of the core support and the inlet is fairly large especially considering there are 2 intakes. The K&N filters are slightly less restrictive and should help slightly with flow and the smooth HPS tubes should also reduce intake turbulence thus also improving flow. The weather here should be warming up this week and I will note the relative temperature difference as the ambient temperature increases and then compare to the HPS tubes to see if they reduce heat soak at all.
My original plan was to go with the stillen G3 intakes, but the more I looked into the factory setup and logged the actual intake temperatures, the less I was convinced that I would see much benefit over the K&N + HPS tubes and the latter is $300 cheaper with no warranty issues at the dealer. We'll see what happens when the temperatures warm up more.
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