[widebody911]

Ok, I'll try to address the various questions & concerns. Like I said, I'd been hearing about this thing for years, and it sounded interesting in principle. I did a search on the 'net, and found dozens of armchair scientists debunking it, but not one of them actually saw one in person, much less bolted one to their car, much less dyno'd it.

A few months ago I'd posted a challenge to Mark, to wit; if he'd lend me one to test, I'd cover the cost of the dyno session. He said he didn't have a demo available, so the challenge was un-met. When the topic came up on the PPBBS, Wayne offered to lend me the demo unit Mark had sent him, and I took him up on it.

I'm not trying to market this thing, so I won't defend it to the ends of the earth. That's really Mark's job.

To do an exhaustive set of tests, leaving no stone unturned, would cost several hundred, if not thousand, dollars. I'm not prepared to spend that. Again, that's Mark's job.

My original goal was to see if the unit did anything. In short, I was able to see positive gains by using the unit. That fact is no longer in question - using the e-ram does produce measurable results on the dyno. It also did this depsite any HP losses it may cause due to the electrical drain of the unit, which was my #1 concern: do you plunk down $20 and get $25 back? $21? $18? Remember, a belt-driven supercharger also sucks power from the engine, but it's able to give back a lot more than it takes.

Whether those results are worth the $300 cost of the unit were totally and completely out of the scope of my test plan. We can argue that the $300 would be better spent on other equipment, such as exhaust, a tune up, MAF, or even a DE weekend. Yes, they could. OTOH, what do you do when you've done all of those things and still want a bit more, and you've got a tax refund check burnin' a hole in your pocket?

Griswold: yes, we noticed the difference between the two homemade setups. The e-ram wouldn't fit on the one I already had, so I fabbed abother ($15 or so worth of bits at the hardware store) the big differences between the two are a 1" 'gap' in my 'baseline' setup because I didn't run the pipe all the way into the coupler, because I was more concerned about getting the length right so the air cleaner would be in the proper place. I also cut the elbow, where it goes onto the AFM, slightly tighter on the new one. It appears that this does make a difference. OTOH, we still see an improvement between the e-ram switched on and off with the new plenum, so we can effectively discard this "distraction" in the testing. On a stock intake, this issue would be completely irrelevant, although I'll be making a trip to ACE Hardware this weekend to buy another 90 degree ABS elbow and a short piece of 3" ABS pipe...

Another test I was planning on doing but forgot, was to run the e-ram with an external power source - ie not off of the cars alternator. This would give me an idea of the HP draw of the unit.

In reality, you could spend an entire 10-hour day on the dyno trying all of the different configurations and double-checking the results. Even after doing that, you'll still be playing whack-a-mole with the critics on various minutae of your testing.

Secretly, I thought I was going to debunk it myself, and emerge as a hero amongst the skeptics. That didn't happen. At this point, I'm a little surprised, a little embarassed (that I wasn't more rigorous with my testing), and about $150 poorer.