Originally posted by AcsRcool
From the March 2003 Issue of Sport Compact Car: The SEMA best of show article:
AEM V2 Cold-Air Intake
This is the kind of thing that John Concialdi thinks about on the throne. A Helmholtz resonator is a proven, time-honored way of bouncing intake pulses back down the intake for a mild supercharging effect. AEM managed to create such a resonator with this cocentric tube design and a few hundred dyno pulls. The result is absolutely ridiculous power gains for an intake, like 16.9hp and 14 ft-lb of torque on a 96-00 Civic DX.
So I'm not sure whether this represents a legitimate endorsement of what AEM says about the V2 or not. I'm inclined to believe that SCC wouldn't print it if it weren't so but we'll see. As for the physical application of the Helmholtz resonator, I found an explanation (albeit technical) on this website.
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jw/Helmholtz.html
Oh, and to whoever said physics doesn't matter. :fawk:
sad part is, i actually understand most of the physics formulas on that site.
anyways, is that 16.9hp reported by SCC (or is that given by AEM?) reported at the wheels or at the crank? aem reports 10.8HP gain at the wheels i believe w/ the original CAI (
www.aempower.com). 6hp on top of that is not bad for a intake design, but still quite pricey... I'd love to see a generic knock off of it. And I'd take their numbers w/ a grain of salt til I see someone like SCC dyno test these. Cant help but doubt they overestimate the figures of course.
and btw, that heat coating layer crap you can have sprayed on any generic intake. Also, I think some of the better generic intakes are modeled either exactly, or nearly exactly off the AEM units (CP performance looks good), but dont sell for the price AEM does.
And AEM's customer service wasnt as great as I liked for what I paid. My CAI came dented on the end (seemed common for some a while back), I call customer service and they tell me to put it to a table corner and bang it back out w/ my hand. One try and it looks worse than when I got it so I just said **** it. What kind of service is that? dented product and I'm supposed to fix it?