Cleaning the Air Filter

I wouldn't say the engine was suffering too much, but the K&N filter has always looked a bit gunged up so I decided to whip it off and service it, just to tick one more little bit of maintenance off the list.

I unbolted the cone at the jubilee-clip and laid it sideways in a shallow bath of petrol, rotating it every 10 mins. until the entire filter was soaked and the petrol had turned a thick, murky black. I left the cone to dry out and finally stippled three caps of oil over the filter-spines with an old paintbrush. [K&N recommend their own special 'filter-oil' , but my guess is that any light-oil will do just fine, so we used a nice, thin 0-40W engine-oil, sue me.]

As you can see in the pic, the plastic mounting-plate for the cone has cracked all down the left side of the mouth and it took ages to find a suitable angle for the jubilee-clip to hold the cone on tight, but only just. The cold-air feed in the bottom-right of the pic turns away from the air-box and does a 180° turn inside the wing before coming back to the filter. This extra duct is pointless so I'm going to make it much more direct soon.

I'll have to see about replacing the cracked mounting plate, but while I'm at it I might do away with the cliched 57i cone and stick on something more fitting - a HKS Super Power Flow mushroom [http://www.hkseurope.com/intake/spf_reloaded.asp] if I can find a used one cheap enough on eBay, but if I'm spending over £100 just on an air- filter then I'm going BMC carbon-dynamic all the way [http://www.bmcairfilters.com/infoCDA.asp].