Well we all know that Holley wasn't thinking very well and designed a tunnel ram type manifold with small ports. Then they go and add in injector bungs kind high in the port so even if you do port them out pretty good you go into the injector bung which is no good either

Well me and my head porter have an easy solution for most of you out there. Just to give you an idea my porter has been in the business for over 30 years and has many big time people to his credit......one of which was the old NMRA SS/O car that was going 8.60s on a nitrous combination about 5 years ago which was hellasciosly fast for that class. They held the record for a few years. He did the heads, intake, spring, cam combo for it.

So he took my Track 1 cylinder that comes stock with a 215cc intake port on it (newer revised track 1 has 220cc). They were semi ported already and i'm sure they are slightly larger than that right now. Right now they sit at around 2.25" tall and i believe about 1.30" wide. This is a little bit bigger than what most gasket companies call a "medium race port".

Some of you are going about this gasket matching thing a little wrong......is it ok to just match up a gasket and then port to match and expect it to seal to the head properly....maybe. The correct way is to bolt up the intake to the head and then scribe the top of the manifold to where the intake port on the head hits it. This is the proper way. The other way will work, but when you aren't dealing with a lot of room to begin with....you want to be as close as possible

Here is a picture of where the intake port on my cylinder head hits the stealthram port:



here is a larger version for those on cable/dsl: http://members.telocity.com/~89proch...ealth_port.jpg

NOW.....as you can see it is basically at the absolute tip of the port. Now you can weld up the manifold to get your more room to port but there are a few reasons why i dont like it:

1) to do it correctly you will have to mill the intake flat after the welding and then possibly, if not more than likely, mill the face of intake on the head to match it.

2) you are going to port up and past the injector bung

----The way my porter and i are going to get around it is, well by using 1 of the three solutions:

1) use an extra thick intake port gasket (1/8" instead of 1/16")
2) use TWO extra thick intake port gaskets
3) use a combination of one thick and one normal gasket

The idea of the above three is to raise the manifold up higher on the port so that you dont have to port so high into the port of the manifold. This is a common occurance with Ford motors and he uses one of the solutions i mentioned to get around with it and he never has problems with it as long as the intake gaskets are installed correctly.....even 2 gaskets on a high boost motor like mine will be ok according to him and i trust him.

My block is getting finished up right now as we speak.....it was just finished being decked and then it needs to be honed and it will be back in my possesion again. Then i plan to mock up the heads on the block with the intake and use the 3 different solutions and make scribe marks on the heads. Then my porter will see which combination works the best

Now once we find which solution raises the manifold the best we are going to use it and i will take pictures for all of you that are interested.

Lastly, the final touching of what should be done to the head to seal the manifold to the head would be to epoxy the bottom of the port on the head where the manifold doesn't sit against which is a dead spot in my track 1 head anyway and would actually help velocity and flow......but i'm pretty poor as it is right now and cant afford it. but i do plan to do it for next year. For this year i'll just let their be a gap, it will be ok.

Hope this helps and gives some of you some ideas

 

:hail:

 

To do this you will need to address to distributor height. Raising the intake will raise the monuting pad and fool with oil pump drive shaft engagement as well as cam gear alignment. Just something to think about. The easy think to do may be to turn the distributor mounting surface down to reduce this height.

HTH

John

 

good point.......i forgot to mention that