Well, I installed an e-bay cheapie air intake today on my '95 Dakota.
It's an almost exact copy of the AEM "Brute Force" intake system. It
was designed for a '97+, but I managed to modify it to fit.
Problems I experienced:
* I need to fab some kind of heat shield/airbox around it, as right now
the only cold air it gets is from the stock air inlet location, and of
course the heat shield that came with it won't fit the pre-97 engine
bay. I did pull off the plastic shield that mostly covered the opening
behind the grill so there is some air coming through it on to the filter
at least. To fit an airbox I'm probably going to have to
remove/relocate the charcoal canister on the passenger side fender,
right now it's a bit tight, unfortunately.
* I had to bend the support bracket to bolt to one of the holes for the
fender liner (it came with a rubber isolator to bolt into one of these
holes)
* I wasn't able to install the throttle body spacer as the longer bolts
it came with were the wrong thread pitch. They must have changed the
throttle body bolts at some point between '95 and '97. No biggie, I've
never heard good things about them. If I get bored one day I might
install it for kicks.
* The crankcase ventilation hose is too short, you have to get some more
hose, perhaps 10" longer than the stock one for it to fit.
I took it out for a test drive, and despite the warmish location (which
is still not as bad as one of the open element setups that sits on top
of the throttle body), throttle response is better. It "feels faster",
but getting it up to 35mph isn't much of a test. I still need to
isolate/fix my coolant leak so didn't want to get on it too hard. Noise
isn't much different, since the filter is so far away. All in all not a
bad increase for the $75 including shipping I paid.
Pictures if anyone is interested:
http://www.moparhowto.com/pictures/1995-Dakota/airintake/installed-cai-01.jpg
http://www.moparhowto.com/pictures/1995-Dakota/airintake/installed-cai-02.jpg
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jun 01 2009 - 00:37:00 EDT
