Iron Snout Hacked

[Staci Mauger]

Ifigured the information on this modification to the air filter box intake is good for everyone as it gives free hp and torque for no cost whatsoever!

The basic theory is that you need to open up the left side of the airbox to increase airflow and change the airpulse resonance (whatever.. as long as it works right?)

Doing the modification is easy and requires Allen / hex keys for the right side fairing and the air-snout/intake channel from the nose. A dremel or similar for cutting the air intake/snout and soldering iron for the left side mod plus a good flashlight.

RIGHT SIDE

Remove the curved hard plastic airchannel and cut with a Dremel cutting tool as shown.

This part of the mod actually does little to increase power.

Only 1hp, but that HP is gained in an area where there is a dip in power and torque.

James Barbour received his M.F.A. in Creative writing from Arizona State University in 1989. His work has previously appeared in Weber Studies. "Rare Earth" is part of his as yet unpublished short story collection, Categories of Refusal. He has new work forthcoming in The River Review/LaRevue riviere, and Passages North. See other work by James Barbour published in Weber Studies: Vol. 13.2, Vol. 15.2, and Vol. 22.2.

The August camp is pitched at the toe of the Rockies, where Montana's badlands begin. Helena is an hour's drive, so when it rains, or people get tired of each other, they can get away and not sulk, or drink too much. But dry weather is a safe bet in summer; there's been good digging since May.

At their latest site, Tom Bass, the chief archeologist, explains why he's going to cut through a thick layer of rock without excavating it. Mary Goddard seethes as Tom's rationalizations unwind. Don't get personal, she thinks, be professional, but at last she can't listen anymore.

Tom Bass stalks down the slope, his cowboy boots leaving exclamation points in the dust. On the ridge the work stops. The few diggers who've stuck out the whole season watch Tom stomp toward camp, then they turn and look at Mary.

The morning sun is hot on her neck, as Mary sifts the overburden away from pink sandstone and speckled igneous rock, looking for fossilized bone fragments the color of charcoal or broken beer bottles. Mary enjoys seeing new specimens come out of the ground, but finding them is hard work, and it isn't fast. Sometimes she thinks about her past as if it were an artifact too. Mary wonders how long she can keep working with Tom. She finds a chunk of the chalk-yellow limestone from the bed Tom wants to demolish. It's studded with bone fragments.

When Mary returns to the dig, Ben Atherton, the site manager, is straddling a jackhammer. The compressor comes up to pressure, then the chisel head bites into the ridge capstone; a discordant city sound pounding the Montana air. The limestone vibrates and rock chips dust Atherton, sticking in his beard and on his sweatshirt. Mary has to smile. Back in the seventies, Ben gave up surfing to dig dinosaurs. She went to graduate school with Ben when he still swam laps every day. Now his belly vibrates from the pounding. Ben's the master of any machine, and no one is as good at managing a dig. Lots of excavations are after him. But Ben's no deep thinker; he's Mary's opposite in many ways, and Tom Bass' complement. They've all worked summers together for the past four years.

Mary has slept with both men, at different times, but now her involvement is purely professional. She thinks there ought to be rules for working a dig. Number one would be you never rip through a stratum without excavating it, closely followed by the rule about digging with an ex-boyfriend. Or two of them.

"Pleased with yourself?" she asks. Ben shrugs. Limestone chunks are strewn across the ridge, like broken concrete from a bombed-out building. Diggers cart the rock downslope to the tailings dump. The ridge is almost a foot lower than it was two hours ago.

Sometimes at a dig the attitudes are as old as the bones. Mary isn't the only woman in camp. Three awestruck grad students watch her every move. She's tired of being a role model, but they're a relief from the interchangeably-named girlfriends who tag after Tom's grungy museum assistants. Mary's not as famous as Tom Bass, nor as sought-after as Ben Atherton, but she knows her stuff. But too often, when she's working, one of the men laughs at the wrong time. Pick, pick, pick, there's always something.

Right after lunch, the diggers make the long climb to the ridge. Mary's the first back at work, everyone else is still griping as they buckle on their carpet-layers' knee pads. She brushes the overburden of dirt away from the Cretaceous stone she's saved. Tom plays hide-and-seek with T. Rex down the slope where his horizon of sandstone breaks out of the ground. He watches Mary excavating her area, but doesn't say anything.

Yeah, right, rugged individualists, Mary thinks. She makes careful taps into the limestone with a chisel, and is rewarded when a chip breaks off, exposing a dark smear running counter to the grain of the rock: a fossil, maybe a rib, or part of a femur, a big one, but not from a T. Rex. Mary begins to work around it. The rock is bright in the sun, and very hard. She blinks sweat all day.

"Look who's talking," Mary says. She went to field camp with Ben. After two months of climbing up and down red rock by day, and gargling wonder punch at night, they'd shared everything two young people away from home for the summer could share.

"Wagon came yesterday. I'm still conserving," Ben says, opening a clasp knife. He cuts the top off the beer can, then squeezes tooth paste onto his toothbrush. Mary watches as he rinses his brush with the beer.

"Thanks dad, next time I'll call," Mary says. She looks at the sudsy can of beer. "Why don't you shave," she says, sticking her toothbrush in her pocket. That's a joke. She can't imagine Ben Atherton looking like anything but a sheepdog in a baseball hat.

Mary grabs her only clean towel, then goes to look for some bottled water. She passes a hill of crushed empties. The tally for eleven weeks' work is sixty cases. They'd easily break last year's total in a few weeks.

Everyone in camp is limited to one shower every other day. Mary bathes, the sky wide above the canvas stall, dawn like a John Ford movie. She towels off, thinking that for a few hours at least her skin won't feel sticky. They've salvaged a wash stand from an abandoned shack. While she brushes her teeth, Mary sees the damage the sun has worked on her face in the stand's broken mirror, and laughs about it with the other girls. They all growl like bears; grizzlies are supposed to be thicker than muggers around the Museum of Natural History, but they haven't seen any this season.

At not quite seven o'clock, Mary stands in front of the cook tent. It looks like it came from a safari movie, and smells of mildewed canvas and Army surplus powdered eggs; real appetite killers. Other diggers line up with their paper plates. The coffee is fresh, and cereal is safe.

Tom Bass doesn't say anything. Mary knows how Tom uses silence, knows from their days together, before he was famous, and she became a school teacher. His quiets are his best arguments. She finishes her cereal and coffee.

Mary's other friends from school excavate roadbeds in the path of advancing freeways, or are police pathologists. She's received baby pictures in the mail. Mary is a teacher at a community college for the nine and a half months she isn't digging. Her subject is natural science, but she squeezes in as much paleontology as she can. She's taught four years.

When Tom Bass first invited her to dig, Mary couldn't wait to get in the field. She wanted to roll in the sagebrush and scrape the school off. Mary was sick to death of explaining and re-explaining, tired of watching kids chew bubble-gum.

This spring, Mary had dreaded the phone call she knew was coming. She wondered what she would say. When Tom called, all new locations, and grant money, he was half an hour working his way around to an invitation.

She wanted to ask him what he thought. God, how she wanted to. Mary also knew that as soon as she did, she was committing to another season. Mary thought about her other options, weighing them against the dirt, the thought of camping out for two months. Tom Bass kept waiting.

Off US 89, she passed two bear warning signs, as per instructions, and saw both Ben and Tom waiting at a turnoff. They knew her truck, and waved as she rolled down the dirt road. We'll see who's for real now, she thought. Mary stopped, and unrolled the window.

In a week Mary excavated several square meters, exposing a jumble of bones, apparently several animals. Her excitement built with every scrape of her tools. From the claw and skull she's uncovered, Mary could tell they were deinonychus, a medium-sized early Cretaceous carnivore with a major attitude, that may have had a social structure, like a pack. Fragments of them kept turning up in the sifting screen, so Mary knew they were around.

"What'cha got here, Mare," Ben Atherton says. Mary creaks to her feet, her knees popping. She points to each of the specimens. Ben sets up a camera tripod, mounts the camera, then focuses it on the bones. "Love it, babe, just love it," he says.

They hear a whoop from down the ridge, where Tom and the others are working. They wave for Ben to bring the camera. He hurries to their dig, and sets up, as the workers back out of his light. Ben drops the measuring chain, and adjusts the thirty-five millimeter's focus. Behind him, Tom Bass shifts from one leg to the other.

Mary Goddard wakes before five. She hears thunder. Rain means no digging, but she's on to a good find, and hasn't yet protected it with plaster. She struggles into her clothes. It's gray twilight outside, dawn a half hour beyond the horizon still, but when the lightning flashes green for an instant, she sees the roots of the mountains, clouds above, with rain slipping out of the foothills. She takes a plastic bag from one of the work tables and climbs the ridge.

3a8082e126