I've been working on porting my intake for a week or so now. I'm finally almost done. Here's the first set of pics. I'll have more in a little bit. These show the intake at about 25% complete.

Basically I'm cutting off the runner towers to reduce the runner length by 3.5" and straight hogging them out for increased flow. Each of the wall side runners has a little cut out to promote even flow across the port. yes it's hella rough still.

 

more pics

 

 

looks good sofar. Have you run the HPS intake on the car yet? Does it actually gain noticeable power? I am wanting to put it on my car but dont want to spend $500 if it doesnt make any power. How long did it take you to port all that?

 

this intake is strictly for my 5.4L project. I thought about putting it on my 4.6 but it's more work and I'm kinda lazy. I know they'll make really solid gains over stock on blower cars, and for cars with cams they're great. Totally stock... it'll change the area under the curve for the better but peak will probably stay pretty close to pre-intake-swap levels. For you... I'd run right out and get one.

Now that I got the process down for doing the cuts it'd take me about 2 hours for the tower cut-off and probably 10-15 hours for the rest of the porting. Getting the process and tool selection down took me about 5-6 hours of trial and error and innumerable trips to the hardware store. To top it all off, since it's aluminum I have to run my cutters at a lower speed than I normally do or the cutter teeth get all clogged with aluminum so it's taking longer than I'd expected.

I used a sawzall to make some preliminary cuts down the tower shafts, a dremel and reinforced cutoff wheel to make intersecting scores (like you'd do when cutting glass) and then just pliers to break the wedges off. I got a handful of assorted 1/4" shank rasp files that hook onto my drill and that's the primary material removal tool for shaping. After that it's all dremel and sanding roll for smoothing.

 

How are you going about porting this? What backround knowledge do you have, past expirence (dyno, track runs, etc.) do you have to know what works best for your specific combo?

Basically, how do you know what you're doing is the right way to do it?

I havent seen much about this intake, but the RR and Bullitt intakes put down great #'s. Especially when worked by guys that know what they're doing.

 

I've been working on a nitrous system for this intake which I'll license exclusively to HPS once it's proven safe. In doing the development for that I did a lot of study on the flow inside the main plenum (used a shop vac and a wonky jig to let me draw air through the intake like normal and a plastic bottom cover so I could watch the behaviour of the air stream).

I am porting mine to accomplish three main goals:

1. provide a cleaner path for the nitrous/fuel mix to enter the runners. in testing I noted that a bit of my fuel substitute was ending up drizzling down the walls on the exterior parts of the runner towers. Part of that was due to the amount of air I was able to draw using the shop vac being kinda small compared to the use case of nitrous but all the extra surface area was allowing fuel to fall out of suspension and disrupting the airflow which I think I can improve. With the walls cut off and the ports opened up WIDE, the nitrous kit I'm working on will be able to spray almost directly into the runners. My testing was far from perfect but I'm looking for consistency more than pure gains.

2. Add as much plenum volume as possible to feed the 5.4's giant appetite and improve throttle response. This is actually the primary goal. When I'm done I'll have added over 10 fl. oz. to the volume of the intake which will have a definite effect. I'm leaving the runner shapes intact (you can see the back edges of the runners are actually enlarged and more prominent). I've just cut the sides of the walls off and added a saddle area to each one so they will split the flow with less turbulence. I still get mostly the same flow pattern as unported but it's a lot cleaner and there are sure to be benefits from smoothing out the airflow.

3. I need to reduce the runner length by as much as possible to shift the tq curve out toward the higher RPM's as much as possible. With a PI intake we see tq peak and hold from as low as 2900rpm to about 3800. I want it to peak at 4400-4800 just like the 4.6. This means cutting off a few inches of runner and opening them up as wide as I can.

I do have a bit of a background in fluid dynamics and I've spent lots and lots of time studying airflow on other things like upper plenums (not to mention my long time tinkering with advanced model rocketry). I know how to make air change directions to where I want it to go, and how to reduce turbulent and increase laminar flow enough to get the bulk of the work done. Once I've finished my shaping and all that, then I'll send it to Extrude Hone and have them open up the runners (something I can't do with any tools I could ever afford).

I'm also port matching the adapter plates to the heads and the intake to the adapter plates so I'm hopeful that this will yeild good results. It's entirely possible that it'll be a flop... but that's hella unlikely given that I'm not totally inexperienced in this sort of thing.

Do you need to be an expert... nah. You just need to know what you're doing enough to stop when you're over your head. I know where that point is.

Most people think just sending it in for extrude honing is sufficient... I don't. I want to change how it works inside not just how much it holds inside. Good question though. This isn't for the inexperienced. It's a quick way to ruin a 600 dollar intake.

 

Thats what I was getting at. I want to make sure people realize this isnt something you can just take your handy dremel to and port it out to the max then polish it, it doesnt work like that, not even close.

Theres a reason we pay people good money to port and polish. Hopefully they have enough experience and research to know what works best.

 

100% agreed. I'm kinda ashamed of myself for not slapping the caution sign on this thread in the first place. Copycatting my cuts without knowing my measurments could easily wreck an intake or even the whole motor. This is NOT designed to be used on a 4.6 ever... it'll work yeah but it's not intended for that use. It's specifically intended for my 5.4. I know what I'm trying to fix and I think that's the part most guys ignore. They think, "...well I'll hog it out and it'll go faster."

I did probably into the hundred+ hours range of observation and research before I even picked up my cutter and I already had the background in the right scientific diciplines to know what questions to ask myself. I also went through the effort to build custom jigs and simulation setups. Those are not insignificant tasks. They took me a LOT of work.

All tolled, I waited and worked for about a year before I made my first TINY cut. I would expect that everyone reading this thread would understand that if it takes me a year to come up with an action plan then it must take at least that long for them if they don't have the skills already.