Need my expert welding skills?

Made a little more progress today.

Attachment 201165

Lesseee... Looking good! Did you: Get a reroute in, SS water lines, charcoal delete, new manifold in, catch can. Did I miss anything? :)

Hmm. Details?

Just the intake manifold and the throttle body, everything else was already there. Going to finish up a few other projects this week. She will be ready for the track very soon.

damn looks so much cleaner with the new mani. when's the re-tune?

Lol i didnt even notice. It was hidden under your coolant hose. Dir.

Probably sometime next month for a re-tune. There's going to be a few big changes made to this manifold before I do any tuning. The way it sits right now I'm very unhappy with it.

how so?

It needs a separate piece made that will go between the manifold and the head. It will be angled and lengthen the runners by about 3 inches or so. Most importantly it will angle the entire manifold up to help eliminate all the fitment issues. The way it sits now, there's less than .25 inch between the manifold and the starter, it angles down, can't access the bottom bolts to tighten them properly, sloppy welds all the way around that didn't penetrate, aluminum on the plenum is too thin, had to create a new bracket to move the alternator out as far as possible, injectors hit the flange, etc... For what I paid, this thing should have zero fitment issues. Basically, it's just not up to my standards.

oh wow. that's a lot of changes. so they're going to have to cut it and reweld pretty much most of it?

Not really. Think of it like this, the part I have will remain unchanged (I'll reinforce it myself prior to having it powder coated, but that's in the future). A new piece will be bolted to the head that will just be 3-4 inch runners curved upward with a flange on each side. On the end of the new piece there will be another flange with studs just like the head has. I will then bolt on the piece I already have. This will solve a couple of issues, the small runner piece can be bolted onto the head tightly, the upward angle I will allow the use of the factory alternator bracket, it will increase the runner length to about 9-10 inches and finally allow me to access everything under the manifold easily.

Damn Jason that sucks to hear about that manifold. Andy was telling me you weren't happy with it when I asked him but doesn't know enough to give good details.

I woulda gave it up after I got to the point of having to make an alternator bracket.

I'm probably being over critical about it, most people would probably overlook all the the flaws. Either way, I'm probably done doing business with Flipside Customs, Rob doesn't seem to have any interest in working on projects or taking calls. SKMetalworks will be getting a visit soon to see if he's interested in the project.

Your not being over critical at all. If you paid for the product and it isn't up to your standards then you have the right to ask for it to be re-done or to take your business elsewhere. Everyone on the forum knows that you have very high standards for your performance parts and there is no reason why this IM shouldn't be up to those same standards. I would return it.

The intake manifold that I bought from Braineack was just about flawless(minus the throttle cable bracket, no biggie) as far as fitment. Now I have more then enough access to the oil filter, injectors and I am more than happy with it.

This is why I absolutely love this build thread. Everything is done correctly.

Do the runners on the manifold follow the angle of the ports into the head? The way it sits mounted it looks like the runners are perpendicular to the flange...?

The entire manifold actually slopes down a little bit from as seen when I had it mocked up on a spare engine. The runners look to follow a straight path outward from the head so I would say they are perpendicular to the flange. Not sure if this is a bad thing or not, but my stock manifolds follow the same path before the runners start their upward journey.

Out of curiosity, what size pipe/tube did Flipside use for the runners?

It was a solid chunk of aluminum that was machined.