Thread: Snorkel word of warning

Hey guys

It may seem obvious, but didn't hit home until today. When you get a snorkel fitted/manufactured/whatever, make sure it has a drain in the bottom of the airbox. By plugging up a drain, you have no chance of letting rain water or the old garden hose water when you wash your rangie out.

Today (if you read the Lifted P38 thread) I went on a trip of around 400km with the Townsville Landy club (known as Roving Around 4X4), it was an awesome day with 8 vehicles turning up (funny enough, 2 D3's, 2 Puma Defenders, 2 P38's, a D1 and a GU Patrol). It'd be a 6 out of 10 for difficulty - the other P38 that came along is a '96 HSE with all-terrains and he cleared all obstacles without fuss.

Anyway, back to my story!

So we're on the home stretch, about 100km to go, all highway. It starts raining - not just rain, it was cats'n'dogs rain. We were reduced to a slow-moving convoy at around 50km/h it was that hard! Now i'm not one to believe in jokes turning out to be real, but I was joking with the other P38 owner that one of us was due not to make it back to Townsville without a drama of some sort... So my snorkel took in water... Lots of it... In one way i'm lucky - my airbox has a drain and the water drained just as quickly as it went in. In the other way, i'm not so lucky and during an overtaking manouvre (this commodore pulled in front of me as i was doing 90km/h in bucketing rain and the only option was to overtake as I couldnt slow down fast enough) the engine began to choke. I got past him and it kept choking and choking until eventually the engine stalled.

I pulled off the road and discovered that my air filter was wet. Very wet. As if it had been sitting in a bucket of water all day - wet. So was my MAF and the intake pipework. The engine snuffed out because it couldn't get air past the air filter (luckily), so I put a spare that was on hand and it fired up and after 20secs was like nothing had happened and it drove home with no ill-effects (PHEW). If anything it's actually a bit peppier! Perhaps a good hot day and 300km plus a steam clean could have done it some good?

As a result, i'm getting some sort of sock to put over the head for wet weather events such as today.

Anyway, i've built up all this hype over nothing really - here's the few pics I took! The flex shot is pretty ordinary, I still had about 3" of bag on the piston and the bump stops were 2 1/2" from touching on the other side, so there's more available than what you see here - it was the only real photo op for me as I use my iPhone as a navigation device and it was on it's pedestal all day.

It was a great trip, a good mix of landy's (and a jap), and I returned awesome fuel figures (used a tad over 1/3 of the tank for the 300km travelled) and the display shows an average of 13.5l/100km (i'll confirm that when i fuel up tomorrow, but am expecting a fill of around 32 litres). Old mate with the '96 P38 was sitting at exactly the same fuel consumption dash readout as me for the first 70km leg of the journey, on the same 255/70 tyres (albeit his are all-terrains not muddies).

Enjoy!
Keithy

Mine is a stainless snorkel, the intake is on the roof (about 15mm above roof height) facing the drivers rear quarter.