How do cowl induction hood's work? I have looked at howstuffworks.com and wikipedia and neither have info on the cowl style hoods.

 

They are designed to allow a positive and a negative air intake for engine cooling directly from the hood instead of the lower assembly of the car.

 

what do you mean by cowl induction.... my idea of cowl induction is the bubbled hoods on old muscle cars for big carb set ups..... that what you mean....

 

yeah thats whatI mean. I saw a 4" cowl hood for 82-92 camaro's but I don't know how they work. So let me see if I understand this correctly. Air that is hitting the windshield gets pushed in through the other end of the hood and into the engine? Does the hood also extract the hot air out of the engine bay?

 

Yes, the hood lets cool air in as well as out. As Coyote stated they were initially used for the old school muscle for use when there were large carbs or dual carb set ups so that the filters would fit under the hood and still get the air need for performance operation. Kinda the way our CAI's work on todays cars. On todays cars, they are mostly used for looks because our filter systems are closed or the CAI is located way in the front. They will let out some heat better than the stock hood but not enough to make a difference in performance. You would get better results from opening your hood in between races.

 

ok, so basically they offer no performance gain? The reason I would get a cowl hood would be for the clearance. If a top mount supercharger is used then it might be necessary to have a bigger hood. I saw a pic of the 2" cowl hood for the 82-92 camaro's from inside the car. There is a metal sheet with many holes to let in air. Is it possible to remove the metal sheet all together to just have one big opening? my friend greg has a 5.0 mustang and he just has one big opening on his cowl hood but I think it came like that.