The High Performance Air Filter

Have you ever had your engine over heat after an upgrade? The High Performance Air Filter will help get more of that cooling air to get into and help your engines needs.

Call me crazy if you wish, but I pulled this old article out of my hard drive because I was nostalgic over Valentine's Day. You see, I can't go through on major holiday without choosing to celebrate part of the holiday by making my car drive with more performance for that important date of the year. See what I was doing last year: Synthetic Motor Oil on Valentines Day. Or, read my nostalgia about love (even more so in the comments section) and a high performance air filter that makes me even happier about my current love this Valentine's Day!

My favorite and most accessible way to get the air you need to make your car be at it's best is to make use of K&N filtration technology, an incredible high performance air filter. I had been doing upgrades on one of cars years gone by and it tended to run a little hotter. I thought that that was okay, I mean I was getting more performance right? Well, wrong. One day, merrily driving up a violently angled hill on the way to a religious service, but engine's heat kept getting hotter and hotter still until I realized that if I shut my motor off and the radiator fluid stopped going through the engine then I'd be looking at some damage. I decided to leave the transmission in gear and go down the hill letting my engine get to a higher RPM, which would allow for more of my maximized radiator fluid to get through the engine. The temperature kept heating up! At this point I realized the engine was so hot that the radiator temperature, that actual temperature that you see, not that temperature of that actual engine was only slowly catching up with how over heated my engine really was. So, wishing I knew then what I know now (You can leave an engine and drive going down hill in a manual with the engine off so that no more fuel is pumped in, meaning no more extra heat, and allow the radiator and motion of the vehicle to cool the engine.), in exasperation I gave up and shut down the car and waited until it was cool from feeling hood first and waiting until the motor was touchable. I couldn't help but wonder if something in my radiator system/cooling system had broken or if my upgrades were just too much. That particular day I had my heaviest friend at the time, 350 lbs. or more and his wife coming with us. Not the greatest idea on that big hill in my little four banger.

Within a week I had installed my K&N High Performance Air Filter. In one more week - having noticed my engine running much cooler and smoother since it was getting it's air intake needs met - I set off up the same hill seeking the same religious experience for me and a challenge for my upgraded car. For a High Performance Air Filter really is an upgrade, people don’t realize that it isn’t just the super chargers or modified transmissions, which are upgrades, it’s the little stuff. I wasn't able to get my overweight friend and his wife to come to tax the small engine as I had before – they were too afraid to come! So I did the best I could to test my high performance air filter by throwing all of my tools into the back and taking my beautiful and normally sized wife. So, still being 100 to 200 lbs. short of my last experience, I decided to do my best with my little motor to race up the hill. My car not only dug in with its high performance air filter but it ran cooler going up that hill than it did in every day life! That upgrade for my car, or probably just me, craved the higher RPM’s! After this experience I could get away with higher RPM’s without the over heating consequences! Whenever you need to be into the higher RPM's to get up your car's hills in life, install your high performance air filter made by K&N and get the high performance air filter advantage like I did!

by AutoBravado

Magnaflow Muffler

Magnaflow Muffler and Exhaust

First, I must say that I believed the mechanic installed a Flowmaster exhaust tubing system on my car with a Magnaflow Muffler, but when I originally wrote up this article, I figured it was all Flowmaster.

My 2 and 1/2 inch Flowmaster exhaust is simply a dream in comparison to the 3/4 inch smaller tubes, which were most utterly not a Flowmaster exhaust and Magnaflow muffler in any shape or form. The torque boost that Auto Bravado's car received in gears one through three was incredible. In other words, my acceleration was much better at lower speeds. Having a larger Magnaflow muffler and exhaust should make a small boost in your power on the freeway, but it'll effect your efficiency even more than in the city. My freeway mileage increased from 46 under the best conditions to 56, even if the on board power didn't seem to increase that much. These results were obtained with a 99 Chevy Prizm, any gains you receive on your car or truck will be individual from your Magnaflow muffler and exhaust especially considering that my Chevrolet has had many other modifications for efficiency, which create power. The base line of where you get more power should be about the same regardless of the vehicle's designs. You'll get more torque or acceleration increases out of the lower speeds if you upgrade to a larger exhaust, and an efficiency increase on the freeway.

Can your exhaust tubing and muffler be too big?

Be warned, if you go too much larger with your Magnaflow muffler and exhaust you will actually get a decrease in your mileage. My friend and mentor put a 3 1/2 inch exhaust on his old Dodge truck - a nice boost from the 3 inch it came with, but he also went for dual exhaust from each side of the V engine. That was just a little too much Flowmaster exhaust for the design of that engine! He had to keep his engine at 2000 RPM's just so it wouldn't die. He had unbelievable power, and a lot of fun for a while, but it had made the truck barely drivable. He went back to bringing the Flowmaster exhaust together with one Magnaflow muffler, leaving the 3 and 1/2 inches of tubing and he had the desired effect: more power, and more efficiency, without a down side.

by AutoBravado

If you liked this article also try reading up on Magnaflow exhaust.


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