that a matter of your opinion bud and that's cool but on my b18c I only done it because the head was coming off, on my b16b the engine was standard apart from a AEM V2 and the spoon head gasket, its how I bought the car. it made 191bhp on the dyno... now im not one to really go on about chasing figures on the dyno but my 2nd ek9 was totally stock, and made 180bhp. It drove nice but it felt flat building up to vtec. so 2/3 engines I had, had spoon gaskets and I feel it does makes a noticeable difference to performance. Fact not opinion... I have a youtube video of my first ek9 with the spoon gasket and aem v2 intake. ill post it up if I can find it, you can definitely tell when vtec comes in that it had more grunt.
Sorry no facts here in terms of the effect of the Spoon HG - so engine A with a Spoon HG
and AEM intake made 191bhp while engine B that was completely stock made 180:
A) Even two stock engines can have a good few bhp between them, especially two 15+ years old engines.
B) How do you know that the AEM did not account for 90% of the power difference you saw?
C) the conditions of the two tests probably were not the same, was at least the same dyno used?
Again, I'm not having a go at you, not saying that Spoon HG is crap and worthless mod, merely questioning the gains you claim you've seen as I believe other factors are likely to account for or contribute to the increase/difference in power you've seen.
If you really wanted to see the effect of Spoon HG on a stock motor you would need to do a dyno run on two cars, take head off one of them and, refit with Spoon gasket and do another Dyno run with the two cars. The unmodified car (our control) should account for any differences in test conditions and then the modified car would hopefully show a measured increase in power. Now I know no one (bar Spoon themselves maybe) will actually do this sort of testing, especially considering that in order for it to have any statistical significance you'd have to repeat it on a number of cars, but that's how you'd obtain factual data, all you're talking about is your butt dyno feeling a difference. A cool observation, certainly worth having a discussion about but should not be misrepresented as a fact.