Took 2" off the end of the pipe coming out of the engine. (The end that connects to the MAF). Also made a new bracket courtesy of home depot and my jigsaw.

This REALLY opens up the clearance between the cone and the rad and with my bracket drops it down substantially from where it was before.

I changed brackets because my first homemade bracket wasn't actually attached to the engine, so when the engine moved under duress, the bracket wouldn't and what wound up happening was the piece of plastic it was attached to (the battery tray) would flex instead. This worried me as winter was coming, and plastic gets pretty brittle when it's cold so I decided to fashion a new bracket using corner braces from Home Depot. (Thanks for the idea, Toru! I took it one step further and trimmed some off the top and drilled a new hole for it). This new bracket is attached directly to the engine, so the intake moves when the engine does.

Anyway, the cone has A LOT more clearance up front and there's no chance of it rubbing on anything. I haven't noticed any changes in performance or sound.

To give you an idea of how much shorter this is - here's the original stock length:


And the new length:


You can see the MAF is in line with the edge of the battery now:


The new clearance:

 

did that give you an extra 35HP? haha j/k man good work!
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List Of Amc Engines Specifications

 

At Least 35 man!!! That's being conservative.

Mostly I was just trying to get the cone away from the rad and reservoir.. Where it is now, it can bounce around all it wants - it's not hitting anything.

 

Well, I decided to do the same thing.

Cut 2" off the rear tube at the MAF end and chopped the bracket down and bolted the "L" bracket on to it.

My "L" must be bigger though - I had to chop one end of it to clear the inside of the main bracket and my MAF is secured to the "L" through both mounting holes (original hole matches rear bolt, drilled new hole for front bolt.)

Of course, while I was doing all this, I stripped out the top of the mounting bolt hole on the block! Heart attack!
I went out to Home Depot and bought a longer metric bolt and was able to secure it using the lower undamaged threads. Whew!

All that just to have the pipes fit straight into the couplers!

Cuz you know what? After all that the filter sits in pretty much the SAME position as before with about the same clearances (it's different on a sedan, probably due to different headlight housings.)

Oh well, it's a more "correct" fit now.

No pics of this of course, since I am too damn lazy to do so unless there is a specific request...

 

Awesome man.. For me it was worth it for the piece of mind that all the gaskets now fit properly on the pipes..

**** man.. bad news on stripping the threads! Hope you have enough there to keep the bolt solid...

 

The factory bolt only goes about halfway into the hole (with our big-*** brackets in the way), so this longer bolt has another 1/2" of threads to grip nicely. I also put a lockwasher on it to avoid vibration loosening. It's snug and not going anywhere!

Now if my Kartboy shifter and bushing would show up someday...