So, I have the stock GM Qjet aluminum intake laying around and wanna save my money for a big upcoming swap meet. Id like to swap my intake to the stock one but first rework it a little bit. Its short enough I can easily fit a heat insulating gasket and a dual snorkel air cleaner under my hood unlike the oddball Edelbrock Ive currently got. So Im looking for advice, comments, etc. Anybody ever done this before? Its going on a GMPP 260hp crate motor so the heads havent had any work and I cant pull em off to do any. Will only porting the intake hurt my power or should I just kinda massage it a little for better flow and leave a decent transition, or what? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Complete altogether utter waste of time and abrasive. Total futility.

It's not the "bottleneck" in your situation, therefore dinking with it won't change anything.

 

Half-correct there, Sofa. Do-it-yourself grinding on an intake manifold is silly, but putting a better intake manifold on there will help, unless the exhaust is more restrictive than a stock LG4 / LO3 exhaust. OP: What "oddball" Edelbrock do you currently have? And for warming up your 350, The best start is finding some non-swirl 305 heads. Right now you're at 8.0:1, not the falsely-advertised 8.5:1.

 

If I swap the heads Id have to pull the motor for machine work. I dont wanna do that. The Edelbrock thats on it appears to be a Performer but it sits up way too high and pushes the carb back. Nobody knows why it wont fit with the stock air cleaner. I think it may be an earlier version. Im running headers and a true 2-inch dual exhaust on it so it breathes decently. Ive also considered a Professional Products intake but theyre pretty high. It runs great right now with plenty of pep but I wanna keep it a stock look and maintain the power its got now. Im plenty happy with my current power but just wanna keep it there and make it look stock.

 

If this is the same intake that a similar question was asked about some time back, it's NOT a "Performer". Might be some member of the "Performer" "family", but it's NOT a "Performer".

Go to Edelbrock's web site, or Summit or the like, and look at a pic of a Performer. I think you'll figure it out without too much further ado. Quite simply, the thing you posted a pic of, doesn't look like that.

Meanwhile...

Porting ANY intake on top of the motor you have now is a COMPLETE waste of time, as far as increasing power output. Ignore the blather above to the contrary. Improvement in fitment, definitely; power, no way in Hades.

To understand why, imagine that you've got a bucket sitting out on your driveway someplace that you need to fill up with your hose. You've got a 50' section of ½" hose, a 25' section of ¾" hose, another 50' of ½", and all this has to go though a 25' piece of ¼" tubing buried under your porch where it's hard to get to. So you're out there filling up your bucket, and it's taking forever and a half... and suddenly you notice your neighbor has a 25' piece of 1" hose. You go borrow it and replace the ¾" with it. Quick: how much faster does the bucket fill up? Now, if that piece of hose was 2", how much faster THEN? Eh??? Will P&Ming about how "hard" it is to change out THE RESTRICTION in the hose, make the bucket fill up faster? Of course not. Will a bunch of "I'm not digging up my porch" contribute to filling up the bucket? Why or why not?

Your engine is EXACTLY the same. Except instead of pieces of hose, your engine has a carb, intake, head ports, valves, exhaust, and misc other "pieces of hose" making up its series of flow elements. Since energy (work) comes from fuel molecules, and the more molecules you can extract the energy from the more energy (work) you get, and the more per unit time that you can get the energy (work) from the more power (definition of "power", from the physics class you should have been paying more attention in: the time rate of doing work) your engine will produce, but you can only burn as much fuel as you can move air through the motor to go with the fuel, it should be pretty obvious that the MOST BASIC ingredient in making power is AIR FLOW. Molecules of air per unit time, such as, cubic feet per minute. And just like that garden hose, to get more FLOW, you have to work on the part of the system where THE RESTRICTION is; piddling around with parts that AREN'T The Restriction, is pure unvarnished futility and monkey-spank. The heads and valves (not only the size of the valves, but also their opening distance and duration, as controlled by the cam) are The Restiction, in addition to the exhaust. You could take the intake COMPLETLEY OFF and just pour gasoline directly down the head ports, and STILL not get any more power than you're getting now.

Go buy yourself an actual Performer, and unload that thing you have now, whatever it is, on the next "greater fool". Then quit worrying about it for the time being, and if you want to make your car faster, come back and let's talk about what THAT MOTOR in YOUR CAR needs in order to be faster. It's not at all impossible that THE MOTOR isn't what's making THE CAR slow in the first place.