Anyone find one air cleaner better than others? I'm looking to fit the biggest one possible under my 2" cowl but it would be nice to know if there are any performance differences in brands. Any insight would be great.

 

An L69 air cleaner would be the best, probably, but you can't use it with a dual feed Holley.

All the 14x3 open elements out there are all basically the same though.

 

My car has ALWAYS ran the same with no air cleaner, K&N filter, and cheap (which I run now) parts store paper element.

I know there was a post here a member was doing a comparison on his daily driver between many different brand filters and was getting a little bit better mileage with some. Do a search and see what that results in.

 

If you have a 2" cowl hood then you should be able to fit a 14x3" NON-DROP BASE air cleaner, depending on your manifold choice. 14x3" filter element is plenty big to feed all but the most fire-breathing engines.

Any time I can run a non-drop base air cleaner, I do it. Better filters can help some, but real magic can happen if you get the LID of the air cleaner up away from the top of the carb. Air needs room to turn and go down the venturis without getting turbulent. 1" above the top of the tallest part of the carb (usually the choke airhorn) is the BARE MINIMUM clearance I'll shoot for. But more is always better. Since you've got more room- USE IT!!

Don't use those new filter-type lids. They flow more, but the pleats stick down on the INSIDE of the lid about 3/4", robbing you of the magical clearance you're looking for. In situations where hood clearance is tight they can actually make performance much worse and cause the carb to meter fuel in "weird" ways that just can't be tuned around (ask me how I know).