BDude555, your truck may have ingested a Ferd.

 

That would be my guess as well. I have the old style AFE drop in and the top end of my air box and associated air intake plumbing that is downstream of the filter is clean and dry.

 

Glad to hear not everyone is seeing the dirt acumulation I found, my guess would be that its just from all the driveing I do in heavy traffic, and the amount of pollution in SE Michigan is pretty sick in general. I took the truck out on a 6 lane highway today with REALLY light traffic, kept A LOT of space between my truck and any other cars (4 tons of truck doesnt stop or manuver all that well!!), and I just let her fly, got on it for about all she had up to red line several times, cruised at some pretty high speeds for a good while, and WHAT AN IMPROVEMENT!!!
I DONT recommend doing this unless your REALLY REALLY carefull about when, and where because the potential danger to any other cars near you! but it sure helped blow the carbon out! I ran her good and hard for an hour or more. These engines like to be worked! She really runs GREAT now!

 

I'll third that. We've been using aFe filters for over 2 years now, and the only time we've ever seen any problems is when they've been overoiled, and this includes smoggy environments such as San Francisco.

As far as the paper elements causing 0 restriction until dirty, this is also a false statement. If this were true, your filter minder wouldn't move at all until the filter was dirty. I've had brand new filters in my 03 that caused enough restriction to pull down the minder to 60% under WOT on a stock truck. Independent lab tests (not just aFe's) have proven that the paper element is extremely restrictive.

Rod