Have any of you guys seen those infomercials advertising the Tornado air claiming to give you horsepower and torque by just putting in a peice of metal in your intake hose? Supposedly, it creates a natural air vortex which may mix with the fuel better than it normally would. They have been featured in magazines and they do sound promising. Anyone tried either of these?

http://www.spiralmax.com/

http://www.tornadoair.com/

 

35 horspwer from shoving a piece of metal in your intake? I don't think so...

 

Im going to have to raise the flag on that one aswell, theres no way right now without further scientificall investigation and someone actually trying it that would make be believe it adds 35 horse.

 

well it says 0-35, and it has been featured on media. To me, this makes sense, the air and the fuel is getting mixed together more evenly but i think positioning and how long the intake housing is plays a roll in how much the vortex lasts. I suppose i'll get one and try it out and tell yall how it is.

 

I have already asked this and almost got killed. lol

someone posted saying that it actually lowers HP since it is a restriction. I too thought that it could work but I am not sure.

 

Of course they make your car faster! Think about all the weight in money that they just sucked out of your wallet. Lighter is faster.

 

your car already has a mechanism to atomize the fuel to create a better mixture, they sit under the injectors and look like little plates with tiny holes in them

 

This proves my theory in the other thread....

 

I was watching the infomercial one night and the guy puts the spiral on the water tank and the water starts spinning. He does it a few times, but one time he was talking to a "satisfied customer" and he put his hand on the water tank for a brief second and it made a spiral. So that is how I know it is BS.

 

Covered a couple times before, but the answer is:

They work great on cars without tuned intake runners, however on FI cars with tuned intake runners (like ours) they prove to be an increased restriction in the intake.

This can be further proved by their own testing where you can see cars with tuned intake runners only get a marginal HP increase in their own tests (gotta make something up) while vehicles with simple down draft carb or throttle body systems show a marked increase.

 

The spiralmax looks like a very mild venturi with vortex generator skirts. The tornado thing is simply a cheap set of stator vanes. Both of these items will affect the airflow, but whether or not they are needed is another story.

I can see a 35hp gain... on a 800hp engine with an extremely poor baseline intake system. Power gains from improving airflow are always as a percentage of the original power, not a fixed amout for any engine. I'm sure that if you read the fine print the 35hp gain was on one monster of an engine.

 

exactly...the intake system on our FI motors is pretty efficient, even in stock form. thats y we dont see much gain from an air filter or cold air kit (on an NA, a TID mod on a TII is nice). the breathing restriction on FI cars is the exhaust and ports.

 

im gunna have to race the flag too....

 

this does not work.
http://www.beretta.net/fast_lane/dyn...vs_tornado.htm

heres a dyno.
shows LESS power
heres what the guy says
"This device is a waste of money. This Spiralmax was sent to me by a mailing list member so that I could test it. I found that it made no measureable difference and may have slightly harmed high RPM horsepower. Overall I would save my money and use it on something else!"

just type "tornado dyno" in a search engine and see what you can find.

 

heres another
"Here's what I found on the dyno. The data is uncorrected and smoothed (to avoid getting too many unbalancing peaks) to S=3 on dynojet's software. I made six passes on the dyno. Two with the Tornado unit installed followed by a 20 minute cooldown (with the engine idling) and two runs without the Tornado installed. Following yet another 20 minute cooldown with the engine idling I proceeded to make two more runs with the Tornado unit installed.

Run #1 w/Tornado: 145.1 HP, 147.3 lb-ft Run #2 w/Tornado: 145.3 HP, 146.7 lb-ft

Run #3 noTornado: 148.0 HP, 149.8 lb-ft Run #4 noTornado: 146.8 HP, 149.3 lb-ft

Run #5 w/Tornado: 145.6 HP, 148.8 lb-ft Run #6 w/Tornado: 146.3 HP, 148.4 lb-ft

As you can see from the above numbers, coming in "hot" from the street produced the lowest numbers. I did allow for about a 10-15 minute cooldown before hitting the dyno the first Time. So perhaps the second run wasn't surprising, with the car probably being a bit cooler. The third set of runs is what put the nail in the coffin when it comes to the Tornado. Although the third set was a bit improved over the first set, it was still visibly lower than the second of runs. (thanks to JTT)

Yet another snake oil automotive product."

rule of thumb- if it 'works on every car', that should set off an alarm in your head saying "hmm, this product looks like its sole purpose is to make its inventers money!"
It's the most basic business strategy; target the largest audience. The audience is, if you haven't noticed, everyone who owns a car. I can almost guarantee that this product is the brainchild of a group of people sitting around a table thinking of ways to make the most amount of money as cheaply as possible.

The commercials are funny though, the one where they have a granny bringing in her geo metro to a mechanic and the mechanic takes her car for a test drive and comes back with a cop and a ticket, because the car had so much power after puting in the tornado!

funny stuff!

if its too good to be true, it is.
HP=$$