I did this to mine. I just never took a photo of it. I have the head off still. Will post a photo.

yeah def not man.

Going back together now. Also a new intake is being built this week. Back at dyno next Wednesday. Am looking forward to the difference we see with a new intake but obviously also hopeful that the new fire rings and gasket work and last longer than the previous setup was. The other interesting thing is that when a stock gasket goes, it's done. When a Cometic multi-layered gasket blows at the track you can turn down the boost and get home. A single layer of copper can't really fail like either. It could leak at the water jacket but then we can just top up the coolant, so perhaps this will be better in all facets? They copied the Cometic gasket we sent to them exactly, so some of the smaller coolant passage holes are covered up. In two minds whether to open these up or not. There is the school of thought that by keeping these closed it might help divert more flow to the rear of the head. Not so sure just yet.

At this stage of mods after repeatedly blowing HGs I would probably decide to squash the fly with a sledgehammer - put several steam vents on the head.
I would guess that a closed deck is going to heat up the HG a lot harder than an open deck, so giving coolant the possibility to flow upwards through several channels, even at low flow, might help a bit?

With my deck plate, I drilled those passages.

We had no excessive coolant temp issues previously. Hardly got above 80c / 175f even when we had the h/g failures. That's without any fans either. Motor about to go back in so I guess we shall see how it goes.

very nice Patrick keep posting

Patrick - What approach did you end up taking for the intake?

Shall do Carlos.

Shawn, we're going to make it in the shop. Well Paul will. My involvement is to point and say "Shiny". No, we're looking at about a 3.5 - 4ltr plenum. Probably fed at the front rather than centrally like yours. Paul will make the velocity stacks too. Will it be perfect, no idea. Without powerful CFD computers we'll never know. Will it be better than the stock one, hell yeah! I'm really quite excited about the possibility that we will finally let this motor breathe half decently without the restriction of stock intake. Also, we used slicks on the dyno last time and they were all kinds of wrong. Hopefully we will just get some road tyres and not run into nearly as much wheel slip. Contrary to what one would think, the softer the tyre the worse they behave on the dyno. Should make the car more driveable on the track rather than having to feather the throttle out of slower speed corners. Fingers crossed.

Oh, we are going to have the stacks protruding into the plenum rather than flush. By about 2-3" like Bas's in the 16v thread.

I am sure Paul will do an awesome job with the intake. Looking forward to seeing some pictures. :)

Me too!

Patrick, did you anneal the copper gasket before assembly in order to make it softer? It is pretty much a must with copper gaskets.

Well, since you are more than likely going to alter the tune to suit the new intake, which will require more ign timing and will give more head room to the turbo, I am pretty sure your coolant temp is going to increase as a result of the additional power you will make up top.
By which extent I don't know, but since the head was off it sounded like a timely while-in-there job.
Let's just see how it goes then.

Not sure on that. I've no experience with Copper gaskets but my builder has and assume he's followed whatever directions the manufacturer suggests.

You might be right Thom. It all came about quite quickly. I guess one thing is that we are only on the track for pretty short periods of time. One of the main reasons for going back to the dyno next week was to test the gasket. We then rather hurriedly decided to change the intake before then too. We should have some answers in a week.