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Dirty K&N air filter before tune


sic GT

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I recently had my VF-52 Installed and tuned at HB Speed. They did an awesome job. I did not clean my K&N dropin filter before I got tuned and decided to clean it today after about a year and a half. The dirt/ grit and small objects in the filter were far worse than I would have imagined. I literally had a huge pile of dirt on my garage floor just from lightly tapping the filter out prior to chemically cleaning it w/ the K&N solution.

Question is: After cleaning my filter and reoiling do I need any adjustment to the tune?

It should logically have much greater flow now do to being cleaned and freshly oiled so I am wondering if the car will think it's getting a lot more air and thus lean the mixture too much?

Any hits on this would be appreciated.

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The car can't think it's getting more air, as the MAF will still measure the volume of air the motor is consuming. So IMNHSO, you are good to go. I've always cleaned my K&Ns at 5k miles.
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The car can't think it's getting more air, as the MAF will still measure the volume of air the motor is consuming. So IMNHSO, you are good to go. I've always cleaned my K&Ns at 5k miles.

You're correct that the MAF will meter any extra air, and the ECU will add fuel and pull timing as per the mapping on the ECU, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a custom tune will be within acceptable limits after this change. I'm not trying make a dirty filter into a big deal, but it is possible as I've seen it happen, especially if the filter is totally caked in dirt. In those cases the restriction on the intake changed enough to warrant wastegate duty alterations on the tune. They replaced their filters and the boost went up a few pounds, in one case it was enough to hit fuel cut.

 

The reason I bring this up is that changes made post tune which are not accounted for via a retune can cause serious damage. That's a general rule usually associated with things like changing exhaust parts, boost control settings etc. rather than cleaning your air filter, but any time you have a concern like this, just ask your tuner what they think. Many of them will offer a quick checkup just to make sure everything is still fine. If you can take a log yourself, go for it and ask your tuner if they'll take a quick look to see if they notice anything out of place. Of course without wideband readings they can't see the thing they'll probably want to see most, but if they notice MAF voltage and calculated load have changed a significant amount, turbo dynamics are of the wall, or DA has gone down, you can look into it further.

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I suggest you take a hair dryer or a leaf blower and blow out some of the excess oil before you put it in. I use to do that with my old car chevy and i cleaned my maf less often..

 

A hair dryer can make the gauze material shrink. K&N specifically says not to do this. The best thing to do is not over-oil it to begin with. I used to use a lint free paper towel and would lightly press it against the outside of the filter to soak up excess oil.

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A hair dryer can make the gauze material shrink. K&N specifically says not to do this. The best thing to do is not over-oil it to begin with. I used to use a lint free paper towel and would lightly press it against the outside of the filter to soak up excess oil.

 

I thought was when drying it when its wet that will cause the filter to shrink.

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