Plastic manifold?

[Daryl]

Scrolling through the old forum topics, a thought came to mind regarding the “weight reduction” thread. It got me to wonder: if so many modern motors (LS1, etc) have em, why not available for our pushrods? Only reason I thought of it is because the stock manifold has a little bit of weight to it.
Just spit-ballin…..

 

[ttocs]

I am not sure they ever made a plastic intake for the pushrods, and if ya dig deep enough you will find PLENTY of topics of those intakes cracking/chipping/breaking. I will keep the weight of my aluminum intake.

 

[shovel]

The lower manifold has coolant and the thermostat housing in it, and more critically many small block ford heads have the exhaust crossover ports in them so a plastic lower intake is probably not on the menu.

For the upper manifold an EGR delete is pretty obvious but lots of people do that anyway.. beside that a plastic upper manifold is possible I just don't know that there would be enough demand for it, tooling isn't cheap especially when the finished product needs to meet a lot of requirements like heat resistance, oil and chemical resistance, gasket surfaces, threaded inserts, etc. that's a pretty high cost product to develop.

There is of course the option of having no upper intake at all

 

[Daryl]

Sweeeeeet!

 

[Mustang5L5]

There was a few. All used the stock lower and were just an upper.



Hartman bread box, downs ford upper, and a couple more. All that basic form factor as above. Good top end HP, poor down low torque.

With regard to the long-runner style manifold, it likely comes down to cost. More than likely it would be a sacrificial mold type process to make one of those. In order to make it worthwhile, it would likely require higher volume. It's just a matter of what the numbers work out to be. At this point, the market for 302 products is shrinking. Companies are just focuses on platforms like Coyote's and LS-based swaps.