Hardball'R intake porting pics.
 

Let's see if I can do this without fugging up the order:

@ February 10, 2007
Started cutting towers down and deciding on a first run path to go.
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Originally thought about leaving them all like this but airflow was being blocked by the towers and there were too many sharp edges.
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@ February 11, 2007

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After getting them all cut down to similar shapes, the airflow from the upper plenum into and around the lower really straightened out. I knew I was onto something. But there were more than a dozen places where mini-tornadoes formed under vacuum. At least the transition to the common plenum was smooth and even.
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You can see where I radiused the transition. It's a lot smoother now than it was then but try to keep in mind that this is all still in rough-cut stage so it should be ugly as hell.
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Here's a wider angle. I left it mostly at this level for the next few months while I worked out the finer points of volume per runner, runner height, and evening out airspeeds at various points in the runner entrance. All the experiments and documentation was useful and I found out that the runners have to open into the plenum at different heights from the roof with this setup. Once that was done the usefulness of the saddles came clear and I made them bigger. Also had to angle the remnants of the towers to act like scoops.
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June 16, 2007

All the serious material removal is complete. What's left here is cleanup of the runner exits into the head, shaving down the injector bosses intrusion into the runner, smoothing all the sharp angles, wide scale sanding, runner interior cleanup and general spiffing. The thing flows elegantly at this stage. All it needs is some detail work.

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Starting July 21, 2007

This is pretty well completed. There's a LOT of fine sanding to do but all the coarse sanding is done and all the material removal is done. You can see the injector bosses have all been trimmed and shaped and the bulk of the inside is nice and smooth.

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looks good...you must have spent quite a bit of time doing that. leaves me wondering...if thats supposed to be a hi performance intake, why is all that porting not done to some degree right from Hardballer?

That's a great question and a valid one.

The Hardball'R is designed for 4.6's which need more runner than 5.4's do. I'm using it on a 5.4 though. HPS does offer porting services for blower cars and other special cases but being realistic, the way I have it setup is WAY too aggressive for anything but a blower fed 4.6.

out of the box, the hardball'r fixes power latency on cars with too much cam (like vt stage 2 or comp xe278) and adds significantly to power area under the curve. When you start adding increased vacuum signal from the long stroke I have on the 5.4 the shortening of the runners stops being a detractor.

My runners are very short..(10" nominal) which won't help 4.6's without blowers.

gotcha. thanks for the explanation. If I end up getting one of those, I would just smooth the rough/sharp edges and call it a day. Ok for my stock 4.6 wouldn't you say?

yep... check out the pics on the HPS site for the one they did for a blower car... that's how I'd do it for a NA car.

What did you use to run those towers down? A dremel tool?

You could probably get in there with sandpaper and work your way through the different grits untill its silky smooth. That would take quite a bit of time though.

jeez that looks like a TON of work and time. I want a hardballer ported like that. It looks great. Kind of still on the fence between the new trickflow and this intake. What kind of HP gains would an intake ported like this be worth on a blower car?

you are gonna need to fix up that other block before you decide to start making more power.

I used for this whole project: a 3/8" drill with 3 assorted rasp bits, dremel with sanding rolls, heavy duty cutoff wheels and carbide cutter bits, triangle file, rat-tail file (very aggressive) and are you ready....a sawzall. I used the sawzall to chop off the towers but after that it was almost entirely the drill. The dremel only really works well for very detailed work. I've got probably 4-6 hours of sanding work to do to get it down to where I'll be totally done but it'll never look appreciably different than that. You want to have some scratching in there (no mirror finishes) so the air will sit in the troughs and create something like an air-bearing (laminar flow). If the walls are super smooth then the air tumbles too much and gets turbulent. I'll be sanding until I get down to about 120 grit then it's finished. I'm at 80 grit now.

The intake in unported form should be worth as much as 25hp or more on a blower car. With the porting that I've done there's no telling but just shortening the runners should be worth a dime or so... probably more considering how much before and after difference there was as far as smooth balanced flow.

I'm considering offering porting packages like mine to you guys that choose the HPS intake. I don't have a price point in mind yet but I'm thinking a few hundred bones and a month or two minimum lead time. It takes about 100+ hours to do a really bang up job so this offer is for MB boys only as I'm basically porting your intake for < 3 bucks an hour.

BTW... I'm happy to provide measurements and tool specs for those that want to try hogging their own out. I do not recommend doing so without a firm understanding of metal fabrication and airflow dynamics. They're both deep subjects that deserve respect. Still, there's exactly 1 way to learn.. and that's by doing it.

FWIW.. if you look at the top left runner entrances on the first pic on this page you'll see what's about ideal for NA 4.6's. There's a LOT of other parts that need attention to make it worth it but just opening those towers up helps quite a bit by eliminating some really unfortunately placed sharp edges (and a 178deg turn totally lacking a radius to follow.

yea its still in the works and wont be completed until at least the end of august. Still gathering lower end parts for it. I had the bullitt upper and lower manifold, but dont really want to swap all the extra parts so I sold it to buy the main stuff I need to get this motor completed. Right now its just going to be built with stock heads and cams, but I would like a nice intake like this after I get it put in....

what else do you need for the bottom end?

Mahle pistons .020 overbore, Kellog crank, and a cobra oil pump....