Bill Waters

Hi Allan, I was on a trip through the outback recently, heading from Brisbane down the Oodnadatta and eventually ending up in Robe. It was a great holiday but I noticed something surprising about my snorkel that I was hoping you could shed some light on.

Driving in a convoy, there was a lot of dust being sucked into the airbox via the snorkel, even with leaving up to a kilometer gap between vehicles. After pulling my air filter at the end of the first day it was chock full of dust.

After blowing it out with the air gun I tried turning the snorkel head back to front. What a difference! There was next to no dust in the box and the filter remained clean for the rest of the trip. Do you know why this would have happened?

Allan

Well Bill, by reversing the snorkel head you will reduce the introduced airborne particles (by the time the dust has travelled past the air intake it’s too late for it to get back inside the engine to cause damage), you will miss out on any ram-charge affect (above 50km/h) but blocked air filters are not welcome around engines.

And it’s not that hard to turn the unit back around once you’re back on the hard stuff.