So after having to take my upper intake off and painting it blue and it looked nice and all I was looking at the black rubber intake hose from mountaineer with the 3.0 cai filter and thought how cool it would look if it had a cold air set up and I went on ebay looked for one for explorer..expensive and I wasn't happy with anything I saw. I looked for ford 5.0 and found 95 mustang cai that is chrome tubing and blue filter and hoses. looked sharp and I thought I could make it fit which I did, but when I started it, it stalled after a couple seconds. tried again, same, then wouldn't start at all. I put old setup back together and she fired up. not real sure what was wrong with mustang stuff but I'm not going to worry about looks..just it running good

 

I thought about it all day and it hit me what I did wrong, lol, I had to alter the mustang cai setup..they have a slightly bent chrome tube at throttle body then the maf sensor, then the chrome elbow then the air filter..well a mustang front end is longer than a ranger and this is too long in my truck so I put a blue hose in between thee two pipes and put the maf sen at other end and flipped the elbow around and bolted maf to it...except the maf was backward...ya, I'm gonna redo the setup and try again

 

Yes, that would do it

Remember if you can "hear" air being suck into the engine then you have restricted the air flow, many like 3rd party CAI because is "sounds" cool, and it does, but you are also limiting power.
i.e. you don't hear the wind until it is "rustling" thru the trees, hits an obstruction, lol.

In the old days when carbs were used the air filter sat on top of the carb and sucked in warmer engine bay air.
Warmer air is "lighter" than cold air, i.e. "hot air rises", so it "floats" on the heavier cooler air

14.7:1 is the optimum air:fuel ratio for burning gasoline in a piston engine, and this is a WEIGHT RATIO, so if you pull in 14.7 POUNDS of air you would add 1 POUND of gasoline.

WEIGHT is the key, and one of the reasons why engines have more power(pep) and less MPG in winter months if you live in colder climates.
Heavier air means you can, and have to, add more gasoline to the same 5 "liters" of air the engine pulls in at 35degF than at 75degF, and if you add more gasoline then you have more power

This fact was not lost on hot rodders, so they started fitting Cold Air Intakes(CAI) on to their carbed engines, to suck in air from OUTSIDE the engine bay, where the air would be cooler than in the engine bay, not much of a difference, but not 0 difference either.

And when car makers started switching to fuel injection the cost of adding the CAI tube to rad support hole was minimal, so all fuel injected Rangers had/have CAI, and pretty much any factory fuel injected engine will as well.

Point of CAI is the cooler air, same as inner cooler on turbo or super chargers, cooler air means heavier air which means you can add more fuel and get more power

 

Ya that's a funny thing, I was looking at a site and a guy asked about cai setups, another guy told him if he was doing it for power save his $...he said ' cold " air intake systems are a falsehood..they put a conacle open filter in engine bay that looks so cool and spiffy but its sucking in hot engine air, factory air boxes are restrictive but they suck in air from outside the engine bay..if I wanted to do it right id add to my setup by running the pipe down to the bottom of motor and have filter pickup air down low. of course there is a chance of splashing water at it so maybe a shield but for now its ok. I also found the oil filler vent hose was dry rotting so a source of leak is fixed. she seems to run fine, the biggest thing ive learned from the 302 swap, other than a kick *** drive, is its a never ending project..lol