You guys are pretty good, you've almost got it. Here's a picture of the 3D model for the first casting:
This is an SOHC manifold for a pair of Autolite Inline carbs. The giveway that it is an SOHC is that the runners are spaced evenly from front to back, as they enter the intake flange. A normal wedge FE will have a bigger gap between the middle two ports. The thing that makes it NOT look like an SOHC intake is that there is no valley tray between the flanges, and no thermostat housing. This is a function of my intake manifold tooling.
I designed my intake tooling to make several different intakes to fit on the intake adapter used in my cylinder head package. This is permanent tooling, but the tooling is somewhat universal, and the intake manifolds can be dramatically changed with the use of 3D printed sand to define the general shape of the intake. For my cylinder head package I make 6 different intake manifolds using the same permanent tooling; a 4V low rise, a 4V high rise, an 8V that looks like a tunnel wedge, an 8V high rise, an 8V tunnel ram, and a crossram EFI intake. Different designs for the 3D printed sand define which intake is being cast. The only other way I could achieve this is with permanent tooling for all six intakes. BIG $$$$$$, one set of permanent tooling was enough.
Unfortunately, the tooling is not quite wide enough to cast a complete intake for the SOHC. For an SOHC intake, the widest I can make it leaves it about half an inch short on each side of reaching the intake flanges on the heads. However, a 1/2" thick port plate can be easily machined to make up that gap. I plan to build those plates, and a connecting valley plate to bolt them together, in order to allow this intake to work on an SOHC. But I won't be able to machine in the thermostat housing and water jacket passage, so this intake will have to use a remote thermostat housing. I don't particularly care about that, but some people may not like it. In any case, if my plan works, I can use the port plates and center plates as a base, kind of like my intake adapters, and be able to build many different SOHC intakes. I think that will be cool if I can make that happen.
In light of all this, the next intake should be easy to figure out. Here is the 3D model:
Since I make a tunnel port intake adapter, there is plenty of room in the permanent tooling for a tunnel port version of the SOHC intake. Of course, tunnel ports have the center two ports on the head right next to each other. That is the giveway on this intake, the close proximity of the center runners as they enter the intake flange. So, this is a tunnel port intake for a pair of Autolite Inline carbs, that will fit on my tunnel port intake adapter.
I'm surprised you guys were this close on the last casting. Here is what the 3D model looks like:
This is an intake designed to work with the intake adapter (shown in the pictures) used with my cylinder heads, which also have the ports in the tunnel port position. It is for use with a Vortech centrifugal supercharger, which blows air into the throttle body at the low part of the intake. The air enters the smaller casting shown in the original post, which will be bolted to the bottom of the rest of the intake. Due to limitations in the intake tooling, I had to make this in two pieces.
I could have designed this intake in a much more compact fashion, but I wanted to put air to water intercoolers in it. The picture below shows the intake with the machined top plate removed:
The two purple boxes are 4" X 4" air to water intercoolers. The caps on the front and rear of the plenum area are for water inlets and outlets. The car (my 68 Shelby) with have a pump and intercooler radiator in the front, and a reservoir tank located in the factory battery position. This is kind of my version of a newer, Whipple style induction system with the intercoolers that they use. I worked for a while with an engineer at Whipple trying to figure out how I could get one of their blower systems under the hood, but with an FE and my cylinder head package it just wasn't feasible. The centrifugal blower solves the problem.
I will machine the lid from billet, to try to match the Cobra LeMans valve covers that will be on the car. I always preferred the "Powered by Ford" script on the small block Ford valve covers, so I'm going to put that on my lid as shown in the pics.
I'm now up to 7 different intakes for my cylinder heads, 3 different intakes for tunnel ports, and hopefully 1 intake for the SOHC. It is really, really fun for me to be able to design all this cool stuff and then actually see it cast in aluminum. The only downside is that the foundry won't take orders for less than 10 castings at a time, so I have to wait until I have enough orders in hand before I sneak in a couple of new intakes
Hopefully more to come...
