Will a cold air intake flood or do any harm to my 2013 3.7 v6 mustang?
There are two conditions that can be described as flooding the engine- 1. The most common is when the engine gets flooded with fuel, this should not happen just because a cold air intake is installed, provided the filter does not get wet with water. 2. Water damage, now this can happen because they are low and subject to splash when driving through high water. Some times this just cuts down on air flow resulting in a gasoline flooding. They do make safety by-pass filters that can be mounted in the piping for when this happens. If the water is high enough and or in large enough quantities water can be sucked into the intake and pistons (not good). Before you go buying a cold air intake in the hopes of improving performance, I would like to point out a few things- 1. Intakes are heated with the same coolant that provides heat inside the car during the winter. So no matter what you do, during operation the air will be above ambient air temps once the engine warms up. 2. With a little modifications you can take advantage of the existing air box to provide the same benefit as a more expensive after market unit. 3. Ram air is better then a plain cold air intake. If you take a look at Ford units that are built for the police you will notice an small scoop under the bumper that feeds this air into the stock air box. One can be fabricated fairly easily using parts for a shop vac (which can be found in a lot of home improvement centers). 4. I did install a short cone filter on one of my cars and on the other a KN filter in the stock air box. The performance improvement was just about the same. So I reached the conclusion that the extra cost was not worth the investment.
