With my new intake and a 3" filter I am just shy of being able to cram it all under the hood, but not by much.

If this were an 85 and later hood, it might fit. But the 82-84 hoods have a little less room underneath.

Anyhow, I could either buy a new cowl hood, a cowl bolt on or I could use one of these:




If I did use one of those I would definitely set up a ram air system, but how restrictive would that be? It doesn't look like it would be more than 2" tall. That doesn't leave much space in there.

The bolt on hoods are about $500 (with shipping)
The bolt on cowls are about $150
This air filter canister cost $210

So it's not a cheap solution.

Any advice?

 

Carbs are very sesitive to having some "room" above them so the air can straighten out before it goes down past the air bleeds and through the venturis. Weird fuel metering can result, stumbes that can't be cured, stuff that can't be tuned around.

A 14x3 with a 1.5" drop base is about as low as you can go on most carbs and still get enough room over the carb. I currently have a 14x2.5" with a 1.5" drop base on my carb for hood clearance issues, but I scratched and scraped for every millimeter I could get with multiple air cleaner gaskets stacked up, etc.

My setup is a cheap Summit 14x3 1.5" drop base air cleaner with a 2.5" filter element in it and a stack of air cleaner gaskets about 1/4" high on top of the carb. For a QJet carb that's about as low as you can go. Any lower and it won't meter fuel correctly.

Holleys usually require a little more height over the carb because the choke tower is significantly taller than a QJet.

 

I have an edelcrap carb on there right now.

I may be able to get it to fit if I can squeeze 1/2 an inch or so somewhere. I can trim under the hood, get a smaller carb gasket and maybe that would do it.

I dunno. I suspect that the Hi Tek cleaner would be just like you said, too short.