About 5000 miles (3 months) ago, I changed out the air filter (got rid of the failing K&N).
It's a canister-type similar to this:
The basic replacement didn't fit snugly, so a hose clamp was attached to the intake coupling. Some lithium grease was applied to arrest any possible dust leakage. All was for naught, since apparently the hose clamp was too tight.
The hard plastic coupling broke, allowing unfiltered air into the engine. I discovered it since air intake temps were around 140F+, so something was up.
Now we have a problem. There's dust in the intake hose, and the break wasn't clean. A 1 cm x 3 cm shard of hard plastic is missing.
I cleaned the hose and sprayed the throttle body and intake as best as possible with carb cleaner and seafoam -- then changed the oil/filter and installed a higher quality air filter (with a slightly snug clamp).
The Question:
The intake hose was mildly dusty. How bad is this for the engine?
The mystery plastic piece: I've had redline runups to clean the SeaFoam through, so the piece would have had to have either made it upstream or fallen harmlessly to the ground. What would happen if this gets drawn into the combustion chamber (dare I ask)?
It runs great. So far.
All of this because of a precaution to prevent exactly what happened. Yeah.
RH77