1971 Firebird Build ("The Other Woman", a.k.a. Project "T.O.W.")

[carbuff]

This update is for Greg.

As I've said before, I was worried about the amount of air we were going to get into the engine due to the tight sparing around the air cleaner lid under the shaker. While Greg was in town, he beat into my head that I should just scrap the air filter and replace it with a big block of foam. While I wasn't thrilled with a big foam block, it did get the wheels turning. Eric and I started talking about it, and we came up with this:



What we did was purchase a second air cleaner lid from PTFB, and Eric cut out the 4 quarters on both lids to open up as much area as we felt we could. Then he epoxied down some stainless mesh to the 'base' lid to support the back of the foam filter material. The green foam is the fine material to catch the smallest particles possible. The 2 lids then sandwich the foam to hold it in place with 4 screws holding the 2 pieces together. The upper piece was trimmed as much as possible, and then a rubber strip was added to the edge to prevent direct metal on metal contact and to also seal the edge.

Here are the 2 lids and the filter:



The one with the mesh actually holds the round filter in place. The foam only comes in a piece that's about 12" wide, so it's just wide enough to work for us.

Here it is installed:





You can't tell from this, but it BARELY clears the fiberglass of the shaker. That after a lot of shaping by Eric. But it seems like it will work. It's hard to tell how much improvement we get from this, but that's a significant improvement in the filtering area.

So thanx Greg, for making me put a green filter on top of the pink K&N that I was already using. Thankfully they will mostly be hidden under the shaker!