Well, it took a while, but I finally got my pattern shop and casting foundry picked out for this project, and got the ball rolling there. The whole pattern maker / foundry deal was rather interesting. I called several foundries in my area to see about doing this work, and also a couple of out of state foundries. Each foundry had a particular pattern maker that they prefer to deal with, so I ended up getting quotes on this project in pairs, one quote from the pattern maker and one quote from the foundry. As it turned out, I liked one particular pattern maker / foundry the best, because they had experience with automotive parts (the pattern maker had a casting of a flathead intake manifold on his desk that he had done the patterns for), and the foundry was relatively inexpensive on the finished castings if I bought in quantities of 100. I had previously set my financial break-even point on this project at 100 manifolds, so this dovetailed nicely with my previous estimates. As it happened the pattern maker was also the most expensive of the ones that I got quotes from, but his patterns were more production oriented than the others I'd seen, and were also designed to work with the tooling in the foundry. So I ended up settling on these two companies for the work.
One company that I'd had high hopes for was Edelbrock. They advertise their foundry services as a separate product offering from their aftermarket performance products, and I thought it would have been really cool to have my intake cast up by Edelbrock. But I was concerned about the intellectual property side of that equation, and wanted to have a standard non-disclosure agreement in place with Edelbrock before I revealed the details of the design to them. According to the foundry manager that I talked to, the main Edelbrock office handled that sort of thing, and he sent a request over to them for a non-disclosure agreement Unfortunately, it never came. I called the foundry manager back twice, and he finally had me send him an email asking for the agreement, and copying someone in the corporate office at Edelbrock who would be able to provide it. Nothing. I was really surprised and disappointed by this, because I'd heard good things about working with Edelbrock's foundry. But if after a month I couldn't even get a simple NDA, I had a bad feeling about going forward with them. So, I abandoned the idea of having Edelbrock do the castings.
Today I took the afternoon off of work and spent it at the pattern maker's shop. We went through the details of the model of the intake manifold, and the pattern maker made some changes to the model to add draft in certain spots, and remove some material in an effort to make the casting lighter. He will be providing full size plots of the revised design for me to check by the end of this week, and assuming they look good, I will have to write him a pretty big check to get him going on the master pattern for the intake, plus the core pattern for the water jacket passage and the core patterns for the ports.
Schedule is looking like another six weeks before the patterns are ready, and another four weeks after that before the first intakes will be cast. I'm going to go with an initial prototype run of 5 intakes, get them heat treated and develop the machining programs, and then place my production order of 100 manifolds. So it will be mid April before I have the castings, and probably the end of May before I'm ready to make the production order of manifolds. So it looks like the June-July time frame before the intakes will be up for sale. This is longer than I was hoping for, of course, but maybe it can get accelerated along the way; we'll have to see.
Also, now that I have the quotes for the work that I'll be going with, I have a pretty good idea of how the price is going to come out. The rising cost of sand over the last 6-12 months, plus some EPA regulations for disposing of the sand, are adding to my initial cost estimate. Sand price is up due to the huge demand from oil exploration using the fracking process going on around the country, especially in North Dakota. Plus, according to the foundry guy the cost of disposing of silica sand that has been treated with the binder chemicals needed for making casting forms is $0.18 per pound; disposing of the sand properly is an EPA requirement. These two cost increases add about $50 to the cost of the castings, so right now its looking like I'll be selling the medium riser versions of the castings for around $450 each, rather than $400 as I had originally anticipated. The high riser and tunnel port versions will be substantially more expensive, unfortunately, because I don't think I'll be able to sell anywhere near 100 of those, and so the cost of the patterns for those versions will have to be spread among much fewer manifolds. I haven't settled on pricing for those two versions yet, but I'd expect them to be in the $650 - $750 range.
I will post another update on this project in a few weeks when the schedule firms up a little more. Thanks again for all the interest in this project - Jay
