Sorry I fell off the radar with the "project".

I've had a whole bunch of crazy stuff all happen at once - and some very expensive repairs. I will try to put the scoop on tonight!

But still, I have to say I LOVE the banks better than the AFE. My AFE would get dirty so quick because it was sucking a lot of air from the engine bay - and yes, the guard was in place. So then I had to put one of those stupid $40 AFE "condoms" on it to try to get it to filter better.

Having the filter totally enclosed and at least sucking air from the fender is the way to go IMO. The fender itself acts as a "prefilter" keeping all that poplar tree fuzz off my intake!

Having the added benefit of using the stock filter minder is nice too.

Sure the AFE may be cheaper. Maybe they might have a better filter membrane. But why not an enclosed box? Why not use a filter minder? Less engineering on the AFE. Simpler design. So it's less expensive.

 

I installed the super scoop last night. It didn't take long...maybe an hour at most...probably could have been less if my garage wasn't a mess.

So I had the day to drive the truck around and like I thought, it was pretty hard to tell any noticible performance increases. When you're pushing around 400 horsepower, I'd hate to guess some double digit gain...that's too subjective for my taste.

However, the intake air temperatures were very different for the three configurations. With the digital gauges reading to a resolution of a 10th of a deg. C: speculation disappeared.

To sum up:

With my AFE Stage II the intake air would remain fairly warm when the engine was up to temp - about 30 deg. C higher. The only way to get it to cool down was to drive at above 80 kms for prolonged periods - I'd guees it's the amount of time to get a sufficient volume of air past all the "obstructions" behind the grill, to wash out the hot engine air.

With just the Banks intake (no superscoop) the air temps hovered at about 20 deg. C above ambient when the engine was up to temp. But those numbers fell fairly quick at a linear rate...and I could be driving at 30 km/h or 100 km/h - it didn't matter. Revving the engine at standstill seemed to have a little effect in dropping intake temps, but not a whole lot (maybe a half degree over a minute or two). From engine air temp to ambient temp, this setup took maybe 4 - 5 minutes to cool down when driving.

With the superscoop installed, at engine running temp, the gauge reads at about +20 higher than ambient, and interestingly enough, simply revving the engine gets the intake temp to really drop (about a degree every 20 seconds). That wasn't possible with the other two configs. In addition, there is a very noticble correlation between the speed at which one drives and the rate at which the temperature drop occurs. The faster I drive, the faster the intake temp dectreases. Now I can get from +20 above to ambient in less than a minute.

So it really seems like the scoop works in collecting air. And I would speculate the scoop opening has the added benefit of providing a second opening in the system (the fender opening of the box is the other) allowing for more flow, even at standstill.

I now wonder if there isn't a lag in the temperature sender, that the sensor being metal takes time to cool off - so maybe the banks w/superscoop is even quicker than what the gauge reads. Who knows.

Am I glad I switched? Absolutely. Would I recommend the full system to others? Without question.

What would make the Banks system better?

1. Provide an airtight seal between the air box and the scoop (it's just plastic that fits into plastic with a couple of bolts). Banks could have put a foamy gasket at the junction of the box and the scoop.
2. Provide a better seal between the air box and the fender opening -possibly extend the box into the fender about an inch or fabricate an extension to bolt onto the fender hole...

And that's all I can think of...(probably long-winded enough anyway... )

 

Great write-up and I'm not trying to hijack your tread, but I'm interested in making a home made air scoop and found this link (GMC)

http://aplsweb.com/Topics/Bens-Air-Box/Bens-Air-Box.htm

My biggest thing is it sucking up rain & snow.

 

That's where the banks is nice too...the scoop has a pass-through design at the bottom that allows rain and snow to continue through. Also, at the top of the scoop, the filter points down so any rain or snow that makes it up the scoop would slam into the plastic cap of the filter. And then of course, the system is not solely pulling air from the scoop; it pulls air from the fender as well.

And I guess the other thing is "looks" too - I wouldn't want my buddy asking why there is a vacuum cleaner hose on my truck:

"Dude! Is your truck a pumper truck or somethin'?! "