THE FRENCHTOWN FLYER":3kse809w said:
Many thanks to Stubby for giving me two nice HS6 SU carbs.
I built this intake last week for them. It usually takes me about two hundred hours to fabricate an intake manifold using hammerform dies. This time I decided to make it out of flat aluminum stock. It only took about 40 hours to get this far. I still have to make throttle linkage and an equilizer tube, plus polish it all up, but you get the general idea. Does it look old fashioned? I did zero calculations on it - just grabbed a pencil and sketched the runners kinda seat-of-the-pants like.
Nice work.
It looks pretty cool, should look somewhat "vintage" when it's all ground smooth and polished and such. The overall shape is pleasing to the eye, and they at least
look like they'll flow pretty well. Not to worry, of course. Even if they're less than optimized I have a feeling that you'll still be making more than enough torque and horsepower to get that light vehicle moving in a sufficiently "brisk" manner for the car to provide some ripping good motoring fun.
Assuming they're big enough to feed that critter I think you ought to be able to get them working just fine. I would imagine that the planned equalizer tube should do a lot to help them to get enough air into the cylinders if it's large enough to allow each of the cylinders to draw from both carbs.
I suppose you'll be needing to find some appropriate vintage looking air filters or air horns for those carbs, but I am sure there must be some out there in catalogs full of gizmos for the guys who mess around with vintage Jags and such.
I'm sitting here envisioning a throttle linkage with at least one bell crank that's drilled full of lightening holes. I'm also wondering if engine-turning some of the parts might not help with the illusion of if being something exotic. Then again that would be a heck of a lot of work, so ...
Have you measured to see how close to the left hood side the overall assembly will be? It looks pretty darn wide, doesn't it?
One thing I do wonder about. For somebody not trying for a vintage look, would it be easier to build an intake like that using tubing and flanges and such? Sort of like a header, but with a plenum and carb flanges rather than a collector? Or does that approach just not work very well on the intake side?