Lets put it this way....

I drove my IS350 for about 20 min. Lots of this time was under quite a bit of hard aceleration. After that I popped the hood to show my buddy the "new" JoeZ I had installed. The sucker was not even warm.

 

That's to be expected. Unfortunately, it's not a good thing that it feels cool to the touch since that means the heat is soaking through VERY quickly. You know that the heat is there (in the engine compartment), so you should expect the pipe to be hot on the outside if it is well insulated. Consider an insulated coffee cup. If the insulated cup is any good, the outside will be cool and the inside will stay hot. If the intake pipe is insulated, the outside will be hot, and the inside will stay cool.

That said, I still like the fact that the JoeZ pipe is smooth, and doesn't have the resonator. I added that pipe and also removed the resonator from the cold air snorkel by blocking the hole.

 

As far as I'm concerned, every short ram is a piece of crap, and robs power. I recently did dyno testing with the hood up and down to show how much difference cool air makes. This was done with the stock intake, so I'm sure the results with a short ram would be even worse. With enough cool air blowing into the front of the car (ie. while driving), the stock intake get plenty of cool air (verified via OBDII), but the short rams won't.

Red is with the hood up, and blue is with the hood down.

 

That's great, but that doesn't mean anything except that it didn't get warm after 20 minutes. It's a simple piece of aluminum, it does not have any special heat repelling properties. The stock rubber piping would not have gotten warm either in those conditions.

 

Just to prove that these weren't "worst case" results. Here are all 7 dyno runs. I did 3 runs with the hood down, and 4 with the hood up.

 

so what your saying is, with my hood removed, i can get up to 16whp? lol

 

What I'm saying is that if you take your hood off, you can get what short rams are getting on the dyno.

 

Hood closed + closed intake = less power
Hood Closed + intake that sucks mostly hot air = even less power

I think that is his point. Also i you run with your hood off you may make more power. I would run friday night drags at the beach with my Torino with the hood off. Got me better off the line starts.

 

I agree, but only on the dyno. I think that the stock intake performs fine with the hood closed while driving since there is plenty of cool air flowing in. The air flowing in on a dyno is probably only moving at 10 MPH. It was just a 2 1/2 foot fan blowing on the car.

 

im gonna take off my hood and drive around like that from now on, haha.

 

So you guys are saying that this intake will actually hurt performance on the road? What about the JoeZ pipe?

 

I believe that ANY short ram will reduce power on the street (with the hood closed). I will continue to believe this until I have an opportunity to do some datalogging with my fuel controller software (which generates a torque curve on the street).

 

The biggest drawback to the short ram intakes is that they suck up the heat generated by engine. This is not a good thing being stuck in traffic, at a stoplight, etc.

This is not so much a concern when the car is actually moving but you're still going to get additional heat regardless because of the proximity of the engine. However, you also have to remember that even when you're moving, much of the air getting through to the filter has already passed the radiator, which is going to add heat.

Some of the manufacturers offer a heat shield. Unless they totally encapsulate the filter element (like the stock airbox or the stillen cai for the G35), they really won't be very effective. It's just another way to make a few bucks for them but they're also acknowledging the fact that their filter is sucking in hot air.

JoeZ: I'm not an airflow dynamicist but the idea that a completely smooth tube without a resonator v. the partially ribbed (for fit and flexibility) stock tube with a resonator will cut down on the turbulence, which in turn might help air flow makes a certain amount of sense. However, things don't always work as we think they should (dimples on a golf ball, having a truck's lift gate up instead of down helps MPG, etc.) Also, the fact that it is made out of aluminum, which is much more susceptible to heat soak v. the polymer stock tube is a negative, IMO.

 

I agree with everything you just said, except the issue about heat soak. It was proven over on IS300.net that the JOEZ intake has very similar intake temps as the stock intake pipe. The air just rushes through too quickly to be affected. http://my.is/forums/showthread.php?t=296064

"On the freeway, we saw around 10-12* above ambient for the LMS, while stock and JoeZ were 4-6."

"When launching @ WOT the engine bay is quickly "blown out" and IATs quickly drop to numbers comparable to stock or the JoeZ. Same on the highway, the 6* cruising difference became much smaller as soon as you gunned it, with all intakes getting very similar temperature deltas." dasgalloway

 

Hey James. The velocity of the air going through the pipe is only going to dictate how quickly the tube cools down, not whether it cools down.

Whether the heat soak makes an appreciable difference...