Mongo

Not practical from an accounting perspective let alone for inventory and space.

GregBBRD

Space availablity for throttle body turns out to be a factor.

Not everything from the lowest bidder always works.

Rob Edwards

From the Ministry of Understatement. S*** is mAd tIte under the intake tubes...

Mongo

Yes space is limited in that Vee, especially considering the design of the airbox and trying to 'adapt' a new manifold and throttle body to it. This will definitely be a thought-heavy process.

GregBBRD

Mark:

Since you've never purchased anything from me...you would have no way of knowing the following:

Everything I make has been carefully engineered and tested. It comes complete with instructions and the pieces required for installation.

In short: It fits and it works.

I don't cobble anything together and send it off, hoping that the purchaser can make it fit and work. (Did you follow Sean, in Texas, trying to install one of Carl's supercharger kits and intercooler?)

I don't make up power claims that no one could ever achieve. I deal in super conservative power output claims....something that anyone, anywhere can duplicate at a minimum. (Did you follow the thread about my '85/'86 headers where I tried to duplicate Porken's results from his '85/'86 chips.....which I still can not even get close to duplicating...two years and a half a dozen installs later?)

I don't make cr@p or sell bullsh!t. I make and sell pieces of automotive art.

I make only the very best stuff that I can create. What I make is not for everyone....I understand and actually appreciate that. Fortunately, there's a very large group of 928 people who do want the very best they can buy.....something that they know will fit and will work as promised.

Those are my clientele.

dr bob

Mark--

From a long-ago thought process, when a client's internal engineering group claimed that they could easily duplicate my performance results for half the money doing it themselves... I asked why they hadn't done so already. There was a pretty impresive amount of operating cost reduction on the table, a couple commas-worth annualy, so it was an important question.

Ask yourself the same question now -- if there's a lower-cost direction you could take with off-the-shelf parts, go ahead and do it. Many are interested, if you can truly get it to work. How many horsepower do you think it would add to my stone-stock 5L S4? Rather, how many horsepower will you guarantee it will add to my stone-stock S4? That will be key to the "many".

Folks like to take a look at the outside of something, mentally try to break it down into bite-size chunks, and say to themselves "I could do that!". In some cases they may be able to. It's way easier to copy someone's work than it is to reverse-engineer your own. I get that from your comments about only wanting something that's "proven." Can you reverse-engineer (working to a goal without having seen the existing method) a performance intake yourself out of shelf-stocked parts? Make money selling them at $4k?

So go ahead and make one yourself. You have the advantage of seeing other efforts, some that work better than others. How much and why do some work better? Perhaps for your race-only car, random curly belled sections of big tubing stuffed in a box will get the job done for you. There's a lot more to it than that, trust me.

James Bailey

Which is one of the reasons I keep bring up that Salsbury 5150 D an aluminum extrusion made to specific government specifications.....Greg had questioned if it is the proper size but given the price point certainly deserves at least some consideration... the arched roof design would work well with curved intake runners the flat floor would adapt easily to the double toilet bowl S-4 throttle body !! There has to be a simple solution and I am as simple as anyone Kibort's fellow "pure" racers have attested to that !!! as they declared , Who is that idiot ??

Jim Morton

Not really wanting to add to this debate but one of the few things I can contribute here is to add another data point for development cost / efforts needed to produce a working alternate intake.

Back in 2007, I was working with BC Gerolamy and asked Gerolamy to take on a set of 928 4V heads. I had acquired a core/distressed 928GT engine with the idea of doing an end to end development. After hours of air flow modeling, Gerolamy started work on a pair of heads. Working the heads turned out the be the easy part. As we achieved results with the heads alone, we turned our attention to getting the heads coupled to an upstream throttle design. ITBs vs. various manifolds were modeled. We flowed the stock S4 manifold in many variations (with flappy, flappy blocked, throttle off the each plenum, re-shaping/re-sizing the throttle plate. As all of us know, there's not much "real estate" under the 928 hood. With this as a known design limiter, we really took to the idea of developing a manifold that would fit within the valley of the V8. Gerolamy and I made several sketches of the conceptualized manifold. Like others on this board, the basic design is similar to what's discussed today. What stopped me was the fabrication / testing costs. As evidence to get to having good engineering behind drafting some sketches, I had spent over $2000 on flow bench work. I have lots of good data from the set of heads I worked with Gerolamy but never got to a working manifold that would let the head work as a system. Bottomline... That manifold prototype was estimated at $8000 - $8500 just for the fab. That did not include rails, the throttle body(s), etc.

I hope this assists those who think these one off would be cheap.

YMMV

James Bailey

Correct big money to make one JUST to see if it WORKS !! If not discard and start another prototype ! And those were 2007 dollars too Sometimes reality sucks !!

Jim Morton

Yeah, the reality did bite ! I would have liked to have finished that engine.

The air flow modelling looked great. Bringing that model into a working engine just got too $$$ to simply see if the one engine worked... other issue was 100+ degree cooling... but lets not get started on that challenge.

dr bob

Jim, are you sure you couldn't use some off-the-shelf parts from a Mustang? That should bring the costs down to maybe $4k? Seems like all this work has been done before, just needs to be adapted to fit the small-block Ford pieces to our big-block 928 engines. They are about the same displacement, so maybe just a few adapter pieces would get it all to work.


....

GregBBRD

Fixed it for you.

Rob Edwards

Damnit, it's contagious.

john gill

James Bailey

Back when Andy Keel was pondering how to fit the Jaguar Supercharger onto the 928 he was in the office at 928 International and I actually showed him what the 930 turbo manifold looked like and even had the short phenolic tiny port adapter......that was his light bulb moment !! That lead to the "pancake" intake. While the first iterations were rather crude it did prove that it WORKED !! was it optimal ? probably NOT but it WORKED.