Someone is working on an intake manifold for us
heck yeah, large gains to be had without question, as long as you stop trying to cater to the stock NA cars as well, in the hopes of selling more manifolds to the masses & building something that will work well for everyone.... you can not have the best of both worlds & this is why. what I am saying is stop trying or hoping to build a manifold that is going to be better for everyone from a bone stock HR all the way up, it's just not practical, the rest is just reasons why...
heck yeah, large gains to be had without question, as long as you stop trying to cater to the stock NA cars as well, in the hopes of selling more manifolds to the masses & building something that will work well for everyone.... you can not have the best of both worlds & this is why. what I am saying is stop trying or hoping to build a manifold that is going to be better for everyone from a bone stock HR all the way up, it's just not practical, the rest is just reasons why...
Honestly though, if it were my project, I'd have reversed engineering the OEM manifold first. Would require the destruction of one, but could produce a workable CAD model. Run the OEM design through the various flow simulators available to find out it's strengths and weaknesses, and so on.
Grabbing a welder and some sheet metal and brute forcing a design may have worked 10 years ago, but things are a bit more complicated now. This approach only works if you get lucky and the manufacturer included a shortfall in the original design. You could probably brute force a VHR manifold, but the HR again is complicated.
I never said nor meant to imply that it couldn't be improved at all if that was really the goal in the first place, of course it can, just that it would take a lot of tuning & logging & analysis & adjusting & tweaking , chances of just "getting it" first shot by just building one runner & welding it completely up & bolting it on are probably not all that great. considering the main goal of this manifold as being primarily for a FI application, I'd say it's not even worth trying to also get it to be better than the stock manifold on a stock NA HR to begin with. that's just counter productive to the intended goal, if it does what you ultimately want it to do, then it will not also be an overall improvement to a stock NA HR at the same time...
I agree absolutely with reverse engineering the OE manifold, that is a great blueprint for a starting point & without question would be the first thing I'd think would be done by anyone building a replacement manifold. I would even just as a base line, then consider how changes will effect things & tweak the base design to suit the changes you desire, def a good starting point though I would think.
I'm not hating on this manifold, I wish I could buy one eventually...
Maybe if my HR motor was a RWD setup, i'd look into actually making one.. If i had a local customer who wanted one, then i'd probably make one... but it would not be for mass production... At that point, you would be better off making a solid works prototype, building it from scratch, testing, then if it works, getting a cast unit made for production...
Maybe if my HR motor was a RWD setup, i'd look into actually making one.. If i had a local customer who wanted one, then i'd probably make one... but it would not be for mass production... At that point, you would be better off making a solid works prototype, building it from scratch, testing, then if it works, getting a cast unit made for production...
The reason we didn't see good gains from using it NA was because the runners were tuned for the FI air flow of my FI setup and the volume of the plenum was designed for 4.2L rather than 3.5L. We went ahead and did a NA dyno with it just to verify what the flow analysist told us in regards to lower air flow of NA.
