That spooks me a bit Peter. MAF is supposed to be taboo to touch like screwing around with tube length & diameter. OTOH, my geek side is lighting up like a roman candle. I never thought about it, but I wonder what the filaments are actually made of. It deals with an awful lot of fast-moving air in that time while running current through the coils. Need some junk MAF's, an O-scope & a microscope to be sure to go with junk I have to test. Pardon me while I go into a think funk. If it's right, we'd need a dyno or something to get the original tune or better back after that mileage. May as well play like a kid with mods & the Bama tuners. Unless it goes the way of improving the mileage as some do.

 

Technical Service Bulletin
Dang. I've never had an MAF equipped vehicle long enough to wonder. My hat's off to ya.

 

Aem makes a performance dryflow filter that uses no oil and filters very well, awesome flow, you can check them out at AEMPOWER.COM. Also, AEM makes dryflow cone filter that fit any intake you may have, like K&N, airaid, afe, volant ect, ect. They also make drp in filters now for some applications.

 

If you are that worried about MAF damage but still want good flow, I would just go to napa and find the biggest paper cone filter you can and rig it up into the intake, like what the powerstroke guys do with the 6637 filter.

Paper airfilters flow flow a lot more then you think they would

 

I think this thread is going to get my little buggy running a lot better. My filter & box are nice. I just put a basic paper filter on a couple thousand miles ago. But it persistently cranks too long to ignition in spite of long tinkering to find reasons. Well, there are still a couple other bits left, but my gut's telling me that TSB about the whole thing will cover whatever IS wrong. Maybe the MAF heater. Not sure yet. It seems like I should have slightly better economy & power. So a bad hose may have pushed mine over the edge. I cannot afford to throw much in the way of good stuff in there until I can get pay better than state UIA peanuts. We have some great junkyards around here.

 

I dont think the factory or other good quality dry paper air filter would offer much if any restriction to the air flow when clean. But regardless of what filter you have, its easy to test it for restrictive flow, and compare them.

If air flow is real important to you, make a tester. Take 8' or so of 1/2" vinyl tubing, and tape one end in to a 24" U shape. Then fill the U half full of water, and mark the water line. Then install a new filter and cut a 1/2" round hole in the air duct on the engine side of the filter, and insert the other end of the tubing.
Now when running at a say 2000 rpms (or whatever), note how many inches of water column the lower pressure will pull. And with a new filter, use this as a base line. When done testing, just pop in a rubber plug.

Then 10 to 15K miles later, you can retest and see if the filter is more restrictive, and needs replacing, or compare it with other brand filters.

This method is used in large commercial AC system, like in hospitals etc, to tell when you need to replace the air filters, except now days they use a meter called a Magnehelic, but there costly, and not any more accurate. Nothing is more accurate than a real water column. This test reads in the standard "inches of water column", and is a standard test for air filters.
It would be nice if auto air filters were rated in a "standard dust stop test" for say 10 micron size dust, like house air filters are, (standard 1" thick is about 15% effective). Also a CFM rating, then you would know how well it removes dust etc, and how restrictive it is before you buy it.

 

Or you can do what I suggested. The AFE ProDry filters are not paper, they are a synthetic plastic fiber that forms a very efficient yet free flowing filter media. This is the same stuff that is used in surgical grade masks (not the cheap economy work masks). It is very free flowing, yet can trap very small particles. And it does it without needing to be oiled. And because it is a synthetic fiber, it can be washed and reused almost indefinitely, meaning long term if can save money over buying paper filter. In terms of filtering efficiency, it meets OEM specs for minimum particular size. I am using this filter on two of my vehicles.

 

Yeah, any of these new space aged filters that don't require oil would do the trick. Paper filters maybe fine and flow well, it's all mental with me, I can't stand the thought of paper filters. I was at the auto parts store one time. They had a display with a 3" tube with air blowing through it with a ping pong ball in the tube. You could slid any paper filter in the store through the tube. With the paper filters, the ball didn't barely move. I slid a K&N filter in and the ball went sailing up the tube. I'm not a fan of K&N anymore, but can't stand the thought of a paper filter because of the way they restricted air to move the ball.

 

I 'm kinda like you wendell-If I had an old "beater", I wouldn't care about using a paper filter, but my '99 is not a beater by any means, and I'm going to be driving this Ranger for quite a while..so, with that being said, I'm kinda leaning toward that Fram Washable-its cost efficient, and it doesn't need oil. My wife said she hasn't noticed any change in drivability on her Escape, or throttle response. Gas mileage about the same, she says.. I gonna hold off on the purchase till after I get my oil analysis back, just to see what my silicon levels are...I didn't think this thread was gonna take of like it has!!!!

 

Peter, to respond about the MAF, even if it doesn't set a code for the MIL, if your MAF goes bad, you are definitely going to know it. Mine went bad 2 days after I bought the truck-couldn't even get out of the driveway-all it WOULD do is idle.. As soon as you stepped on the gas , it would gag itself and die, or it would start sputtering and knock, you want to shut it down immediately..Dealer wanted to give me hard time about the repair, and said absolutely NO towing-I got the Ranger there, but had to drive in 3rd most of the time to start out with a quick clutch and no gas, and shift to 4th and 5th quickly to keep it from dying..Bought an extended warranty when I bought the truck, so IT WAS covered-no more repairs at that dealer.......

 

Yeah, I've actually had a few. A nissan maxima (2000) that when you accelerated it would stick at 3500 RPM's for about 3 seconds, then downshift. Just felt like a bad transmission. Well, I talked to one of the other techs that I work with and he said he had seen it before and it was a bad MAF. Sure enough I cleaned the sensor and it fixed the problem.

The other one I had was a 1995 olds cutlass supreme. That thing just had the strangest hesitation. It would hesitate under mid load, and would come out of it if you gave it more gas. This one I figured was a MAF because the car had a bad head gasket (so bad the air filter was soaked with oil/coolant type guck) and figured the MAF would be toast anyway. I swapped it out with a known good MAF and bingo. So after the head gasket repair the new MAF woke that thing back up!

No codes on either of these vehicles.

 

Ahh, the ping pong test machine. That machine is rigged you know. The tube is not perforated, so if the ball rises at all, it will go all the way to the top. A proper test would use a tube with holes in it or a slot, so that the more flow there is, the farther the ball will rise. And you could measure the relative restrictions of various filters.

Also, the test uses a weak computer type fan. While it is obvious the paper filter was more restrictive, when you expose it to something more power, more air will move through the filter. The type of fan they use can show a measurable drop in performance just by placing your hand near it, not even covering it, just nearby. The fan just isn't meant to operate at any pressure at all. In contrast an engine can easily pull 20" of vacuum in the intake manifold. That weak little fan they use probably couldn't pull 1".

Also most of the air filters in the store are cheaply made. They use a Fram in the test machines I have seen. I they used a genuine Motorcraft or AC Delco, the story may be different.

If you read the Spicer article, it was interesting to note the K&N filter plugged very rapidly, and after a very short time, was actually more restrictive than the paper filters.

 

I've noticed lately certain parts stores carry really cheap filters. Actually, Autozone bugged me the most for not having an oil filter I'm willing to use. The only usable air filter I remember there was FRAM, that I know to be passable. Wondering if Autozone survives 2009.

 

As I mentioned, I'm no longer a fan of K&N filters. I use to use them untill I read articles on how much dirt they let through. However, I've never faulted them for there flow, they flow verywell. So well in fact that they let dirt pass. I did learn one thing from the tube display, paper filters aren't for me. I recreated the same test at home using the blower end of a vacume cleaner. I set the ball on the filter, then blow air from under nieth. The paper filters would let the ball just sorta roll around a little bit on the filter. Then used an aimsoil filter and the ball blew off the filter, same result with K&N and an AEM pannel filter. Some paper filters did a little better than others, but none responded as well as the performance filter. You can even hold the filters up to your face and blow air through the back side and feel the difference in the air that hit's your chin with the different filters. Now it's all mental with me, I have to have a performane filter. I haven't decided what intake to use on my 09 yet. The only 2 that I have found for my application is K&N and airaid quick fit system that just uses the base of your stock airbox. I know I want a dryflow styled system of some kind, I guess I'll have to wait for some more to come out, like AEM or AFE, maybey volant or something.

 

Paper air filters need a lot of surface area to flow well - which is what they have. Sticking a 1" blower pipe on the back of the air filter is not going to tell you crap. You are limiting it to a very small of space. Not to mention the blower side of vacuum cleaners creates hardly as pressure at all.

If you really want to test the filters, make an enclosure to go around the entire top part of the filter - the wire mesh side, not the side with all the pleats. You are also going need a blower that can flow around 400CFM and pull upto 16-20" of mercury vacuum. You will also need a vacuum gauge to detect restriction, maybe an air flow meter as well.

Anything less then the above setup, you are fooling yourself.