Stage3Motorsports

The first step we took to give our 2012 F150 5.0L FX4 Project Truck some more power (that it desperately needed) was to dump the restrictive factory air box and paper air filter for something better. Our friends and neighbors over at Airaid decided to help us out on our noble quest for better performance and sent over one of their pretty awesome MXP Performance cold air intake kits that's capped off by a highly efficient SynthaFlow oiled air filter. Airaid's F150 5.0L cold air intake is an extremely impressive piece of hardware with a large, rotor-molded inlet tube that's finely sculpted and comes with pre-installed bungs and provisions for your truck's vacuum and hoses. Just looking at Airaid's kit, you can tell that it means business.

Like nearly all of our installs, we headed down to Extreme Performance out in Goodyear, Arizona, to enlist the help of Marty, Kris, and the gang to get some more power out of our truck now that it looks pretty. Once our truck was down at extreme and on their lift, Kris got busy dropping Airaid's intake into place of our stock air box.
As with basically every other aftermarket intake install on every other vehicle ever, the first step of our install was to remove the factory air box and inlet tubing. Kris unhooked the vacuum lines and hosing from the stock inlet tube and disconnected the MAF sensor from its wiring.
Free from all its connections, Kris loosened the band clamp holding the inlet tube to the throttle body and unlatched the top half of the air box from the bottom. He then lifted the entire assembly out of the truck.
Technically, this is where you'd assemble most, if not all of the Airaid intake's various parts together so that you could just drop it into place. (Un)Fortunately, our Airaid intake was already pre-assembled before we brought it down to Marty's shop so that we could take some pretty product photos. The good news is Airaid's system is extremely easy to put together. The filter mounts in the heat shield, the MAF housing slides into the heat shield, a coupler connects the MAF housing to the inlet tubing, a second coupler connects the tubing to the throttle body, and then band clamps hold everything together. Easy-peasey.
Back to our install: Kris retrieved the MAF sensor out of the factory housing and dropped it into the MAF housing on Airaid's cold air intake kit.
With the Airaid kit's assembly basically complete, Kris dropped the kit into our truck. The filter and heat shield assembly actually sits right on top of the lower half of the stock air box and just snaps in using your truck's stock air box clamps.
Once the filter assembly was in place, Kris pushed the rearward coupler over the throttle body and reconnected the vacuum lines and hose.
Everything looked good so Kris went to work tightening up all the kit's band clamps.
Our final step was reconnecting the MAF sensor's wiring harness. Kris gave everything one last shake before calling this installation complete.