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Cool! Now we're getting somewhere! Thanks for the posts guys.
L&W, very good questions. The short answer is unless you're bored and want to tinker, I wouldn't bother.
BTW, I often tell people reading my posts to go back and read them again. So take your time "digesting" it all! I type a bunch of stuff and a lot of the time the devil is in the details. Miss one sentence or even one word and you might lose the meaning of the whole post.
So yes, there is a piece of the intake tubing that goes from the air cleaner/MAF housing to the throttle body that I removed/replaced. I covered that piece in insulation, not the throttle body itself. It's an aluminum tube, un-insulated it can create noise and transfer heat. That stock piece has a "Hemholtz" resonator in it to help quiet intake noise. It basically necks down to a venturi of sorts. It is a restriction. Is it a significant one all by itself? Not really, or at least not that you'd notice a difference in perceivable engine power. And removing it alone won't make the intake noise much louder either.
Speaking of intake noise, here's some more interesting points on that subject... Reducing exhaust restrictions also lowers intake noise significantly. That's one of the clues techs have that a cat converter is plugged, the intake will be louder. On my particular Vegas, the intake noise got a tad louder when I replaced the tube I mentioned above. It got louder still when I did the aftermarket air filter. (I have so much insulation between me and the engine it really didn't matter though.)When I did headers the intake sound got a lot quieter. When I then replaced the stock muffler, it got even quieter. So if your intake makes too much noise, open up the exhaust to quiet it! Seriously.
The way this stuff works is it's incremental and somewhat cumulative. Meaning every little bit counts when it's ALL PUT TOGETHER. One of these little changes won't make you do dually burnouts, but I can tell you exactly what effect doing a bunch of little (and a few big) mods can have on this particular engine. I'm up about 100 ft/lbs of torque and probably 50 hp over stock on my '17 E450 V10. My 0-60 times went from around 25 seconds stock to 14.3 seconds now. Those are gigantic numbers for an N/A engine. There is a lot to be gained with proper mods and proper tuning on these engines since they're basically detuned to death for emissions and their intended use, which is mostly delivery vans. That's actually part of why they don't like to rev out, Ford made these engines so they can't hurt themselves. You literally could hold the gas pedal to the floor and even if the rev limiter didn't work, I doubt you could blow one up. It's all in their choices of cams, cam timing, exhaust, intakes, engine calibrations, etc. They say these engines are good to ~300k miles because they designed it and calibrated it that way.
Here's a couple screen shots from my logs. The first one is totally stock, the second one is a few months ago. Those torque numbers are calculated in the ECM, they're based on factors like mass airflow, ign timing, fuel rates, absolute loads, etc. They tend to be very accurate because these ECM's are basically dependent on torque calculations for EVERYTHING. As long as the tables that effect those torque calculations aren't messed with, the calculations will follow mods very closely. My torque calculation tables are stock, they're the same in both of these logs. The results are not the same, I've increased power significantly from idle to the rev limiter. Those increases came from a lot of little mods like this air intake stuff, to bigger mods like headers and exhaust and of course my own tuning. They all add up.
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