Everyone knows that cylinder heads are key to making power.. there's absolutely no disputing that. What many fail to mention is the importance of an intake that can provide the necessary airflow to the cylinder heads. Most people will try to sell you cylinder heads as a 'means to an end' just so you end up working backwards and getting your intake ported/matched later.

http://www.abbottssuperflowport-poli...w-Numbers.html

Ron @ Abbott's Porting had a discussion with me just talking about the dynamics on how things work. I am not advocating his business or trying to sell his products, moreso just showing the interesting table of information he provided. His results are also on par with some of the numbers that Bryce @ Dr.J's performance. Bryce has slightly differing numbers because he also measured each individual port to show cfm deviation.

http://www.j-performance.com/index.p...ask=view&id=27



Like Ron and I discussed, intakes are intentionally made thicker to provide the appropriate material for proper matching to your cylinder heads. In my case, I have an Airgap RPM intake (210 cfm flow rate average) and my heads flow low 270 cfm's @ .600 lift. This means that the intake is posing a massive restriction just based on total cfm intake alone, not including any other factors that are involved (port equality, fuel atomization, velocity, etc). That's a ~120 HP potential right there. At my current build, I'll never maximize all of that HP, but it IS there provided the conditions are met. I would say that it is fair to assume there's another 20-50 HP is on the table in my case.. maybe more if I'm lucky, but I doubt it.

All in all, I just wanted to share what I found while I was digging. It's not often I find something interesting like this from multiple people, so I'm posting it so everyone can mull over it.. especially those of you that might be caught up with which intake to go with. Also remember that CFM's/flowrates aren't everything, they're simply one part of the equation.. so don't base strictly off of that.

 

Interesting and agree the intake is overlooked a lot.
Many of these aftermarket pieces were designed many yrs ago to complement 190cfm cyl heads. lol.

Strip Dominator does real well..thinking of picking one up. Always liked those

#1 cyl does more noticably than others..hmm.



You are correct in big gains to be had...even if the intake isnt optimized and still restrictive youll notice nice gains.
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seems the best thing to do is bolt it to the head to see % gains afterwards rather than pure cfm #s

 

Yeah, the CFM difference with portwork isn't as much as you'de think it is. I guess that's why Chad Speier is so die-hard about the 300-25 intakes.. probably because you don't need to do much (if anything) to them in order to flow how they're supposed to.