Keep your inner fenders installed

It's about as protected as your cabin air filter is as they're drawing air from the same location. There's drain holes on either ends of the cowl to rid water/debris out. Can also cut out more holes if you want. The actual trim piece on top the cowl prevent anything coming in from up top so unless your doing over the windshield line water crossings your fine. I mean at that point waters coming into the cab regardless. Again the restricted airflow can be solved by adding more vent holes on either ends of the cowl. Below is a photos of what the cowl space looks like to give you a visual if you never pulled the cowl trim piece before. Taken from the mod thread.

 

I would have never installed a snorkel, those are for idiots right, but I wound up buying a used truck with a snorkel. It is actually pretty great. I don't do a lot of deep water crossings, but a few that would have swamped the stock intake. Have to pull the carpet to dry, and it always kills the starter, but nice not to panic about locking the engine when a crossing gets way deeper than expected... But I'd say the bigger benefit is that it sucks up less dust, isn't noisy, and frees up space in the engine bay. Can't comment on performance, I don't really care about that, but perhaps cooler air helps offset the longer intake path.

I'm sure the cowl intake is great too, not trying to suggest one is better or worse. Just that the snorkel turned out to be more useful that I thought it would be. If you don't mind looking like "that guy."

 

Same.
Would have never bought a snorkel but bought a truck with one and I don't mind having it.

 

I like my snorkel. Should have cut my fenders differently when I had 35s, so I could put the liners back in.

But I didnt. So here we are.. 5 years later, and still good

 

I recently installed this. https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/for-sale-cowl-intake-snorkel-kits-and-hvac-screens.811746/
You can diy it much cheaper but the kit made from @dpele is good.

 

Gee who would've thought the Toyota engineers put stuff in for a purpose.

 

I went back and checked and it is the inside of the engine bay, up there at the firewall and underside of the cowl that is the high pressure area.

 

Had a snorkel. Removed that abomination.

 

How to kill a 2UZ? Run a trail without inner fender splash guards...

 

Ok but there are them C4 inner fender liners that are over $500 and I simply would like to know if anyone has a blueprint of one so I can make my own out of aluminum for free I will not pay that outrageous price for something simple that would take me maybe 5 hours to make myself

 

Cardboard is your friend