Extruded Honed?
 

What is "extruded honed" in the context of intake manifolds?

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

Check out http://www.extrudehone.com/oem.html.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

It's like a big Playdough machine. It pressures gritted media (clay like) through the runners removing all casting flash and smooths all surfaces for better air flow. They seem to get some good results with the 454/502MAG/HP500 MPI stuff.
You would have to add a larger throttlebody on the 496 manifold to reap the benefits.
We use them (Extrude Hone) for some of our aerospace stuff as well.
Dave

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

That's a process I haven't heard about in a long time. I thought it was the cats a$$ when it first came out. For polishing and flowing an intake, I can't think of a better way to do it. Works good on cyl. heads too.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

It sounds like this can also be done for the exhaust manifolds. Has anybody ever tried it on their exhaust?

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

I had a 502 MPI manifold done recently and it looks beautiful.. The shop that did the honing said there test results on there dyno reported 30-40hp increase on a stock motor application. Thats a pretty impressive increase for a stock motor, and 1/4 the price of headers...... Imagine the increase with headers???

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

I looked at the extrude honing also and chose to hand port my 502 mpi intake because I'm too cheap. I had the local expert head porter (lapouttre racing) look at the cross sectional area of my 502 mpi intake BEFORE I ported it and he said the head's intake port would have to 420 cfm before the intake manifold would be any kind of restriction. The 502 runners do stick .800 above the intake plenum flloor which disrupts flow,I milled mine off so they were flush and radiused them which should be the biggest gain,I doubt the actual porting is going to give you much gain,Smitty

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

fountainatlast...
do you really belive that knocking the casting flash off the inside of your intake manifold bought you almost 8 % more power... really ?

having built, perhaps, 600 motors of every type i think i can say that thats simply not going to happen unless somebody at merc forgot a ratchet handle in there or something when it was first built. realistically, the extrude honing in my experience has been worth less than one percent on manifolds run back to back...before and after. it does, in fact knock the sharp edges off and tend to open cross sectional areas that are smaller than adjacent ones but that is NOT neccessarilly a good thing. intake manifold VELOCITY if much more important than volume... and shape is the absolute key to performance... and i can tell you authoratatively that a while a mirror finish on the inside of an intake port or intake manifold will FLOW bigger numbers it will not make as much hp as the very same manifold with a mat ( bead blasted) surface. the slight grain on the surface tends to keep the fuel in suspension making the mixture better as opposed to the mirror finish which tends to promote separation ....

it is important in engine building to think combination and package... NOT magic bean. there are no magic beans. and combination is everything... take a nice clean sharp 450 hp motor and put a bigger cam in it without changing anything else and all you will do is make less power and use more fuel.

and think about it for a second.... merc is in the business of selling you stuff.... do think for an INSTANT that if they could extrude hone their intakes and make 30 hp that you wouldn't see that in full page ads as far as the eye can see ?

sorry... no easter bunny, no tooth fairy and no free 30 hp.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

So your telling in me that three well know engine builders (some on this site) that all came up with similar numbers don't know what there talking about????? I guess that there dyno numbers are lyes. While I do agree that that a coarse surface is better for atomization of fuel you can't tell me that a manifold that is far less restrictive is going to be worse then stock. With your theory of thinking then all aftermanifolds are useless. :rolleyes:

I have built many motors and yes combination is key but you can't tell me that you won't gain anything from this process. Now I havn't witnessed these numbers personally, I was only extending what I had heard as pertaining to the question of this honing procedure...

P.S. and your going to tell me there is no Easter Bunny, common who you trying to kid.... :evilb: :evilb: :evilb:

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

there was a racing series some years ago that was for " stock " production gt cars.... and the corvettes featured seriously in this. there was a factory supported team located near me an evry so often a tractor trailer would show up with crate upon crate of engine parts from gm.... hundreds of blocks cranks rods intake manifolds etc etc... and from these the engine builder would hand select the very best ' stock cylinderheads, intake manifolds and the like... and the dyno proved the efficacy of this approach.... the better part of 50 hp over a factory assembled off the production line motor. and then we took and extrude honed a handfull of the cylinder heads.... less than 1 % and then we took and extrude honed some intake manifolds...less than 1 % and not repeatable at all..
those manifolds are essentially identical to map mpi 502.

these results have been repeated on other assemblies as well....

and my question remains ( easter bunnies aside ) if merc could spend 50 bucks per manifold and get 8 % more power and suddendly their 502 is nudging 500 hp a REAL selling point... that they would say " oh hell, never mind, we don't care about that " i am telling you that any engine builder that tells you he is going to bolt a 502 to his dyno and do baseline runs and then unbolt the manifold , extrude it, bolt it back on and see 30 more hp in the same conditions is .... well.... not being completely candid with you. not on this planet

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

:evilb: :evilb: http://i.flowgo.com/greetings/rapeas...asterbunny.swf
:D :D

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

So if your getting 30hp from the intake then the heads are worth another 30hp ? Just kidding I get it. So the turbo turbulator add if false, I dont think I will be able to sleep tonight.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

just do the math.... + 30 for the manifold... + 30 for each cyl head, + 30 for a turbulator, plus 30 for a chrome flame arrestor, + 30 for that magnetic wigie you wrap around the fuel line that aligns the molecules.... geeze..well be at 1000 hp pretty soon and still on 87 octane fuel

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

Hey can you let me know were i can find one of those magnetic wigie thing-a-majigers, that might help for my application.. :evilb: :D :D :evilb:

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

So whats your opinion of the 502 mpi runners jutting .800 above the plenum floor with a sharp 90 degree bend? I don't feel the porting would do much if anything especially on a stock motor but I do feel the disruption in flow from each pair of runners juttimg into the manifold is hurting air flow. About 10 years ago hot boat mag did a dyno test where a shop cut the intake down to match the plenum,ported the heads,bumped compression 1/2 point,tried several ultradyne cams until they found optimum grind and re-mapped the fuel curve to match,if I remember correctly the motor made 470 hp and lost no usable tq any where which seemed realistic for the work done (which was more time,parts,machine work and commitment than alot of boaters are willing to invest).
When I cut my runners down to match my plenum and hand ported my intake I didn't polish it mirror smooth either but the fuel IS introduced very close to the port opening near the head so fuel atomization is a non-issue in essentially a dry intake manifold,Smitty
I think the twin rails I made gave me my 500 hp over stock :evilb: :evilb:

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

stevesxm, are you thinking about carb. engines with respect to your statements on fuel seperation? Because with fuel injected engines not counting TBI, the fuel is not introduced into the intake manifold thus the smoother the surface inside the better the air will flow. Its no accident that Ford, GM and Chrysler all use plastic intake manifolds. Besides weight, one of the biggest advantages is the smooth interior walls which promote increased air flow over cast alum. intakes.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

For a "dry intake" extrude hone works great, for a "wet intake" extrude hone is not a good idea.

Chase910 to add to your post they are now doing some texturing to the intakes to reduce the harmonics in these plastic intakes. A good friend of mine works for a German company that is the leader in design and production these intakes for the OEM's.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

i have no direct answers to your questions. i have some " well it all depends on the circumstances" answers that might be helpful...maybe.

the manifold deal. gm and other manufacturers are doing both injection and rotary molded manifolds for reasons that have little or nothing to do w/ surface finish. with current quick model software and prototyping, it is possible to make manifolds that are very very good, right out of the box. plus with modern materials, a "plastic" manifold is a lot cheaper, a lot lighter and almost 100% repeatable in manufacture.... remember my comment about the truck load of corvette manifolds ? that would not be the case w/ plastic. the molding is so good they would all be identical. plus they are cheap to make. having said that, you are right... the interior surfaces are smooth... not mirror but smooth. the answer here is simple. they are air flow devices... NOT mixture devices. the fuel is injected after the manifold directly into the ports. so you have essentially no volume at all to allow separation of the mixture. it is much different for a carb motor or even a those motors with the injectors mounted in the throttle body... THOSE manifolds need a surface that has some grain to it to work well.

i have not had one of these 502's apart so i don't know precisely what you are refering to about the port mismatch ... but i have seen similar and can well imagine... and again the answer is " maybe...maybe not ".

certainly if i whipped the manifold off and saw this .8 mismatch ide say " hmmm lets get rid of that and see what happens...and i would. on the dyno in a back to back w/ no other changes would tell me if i was right or wrong. i have seen it go both ways.... flow within a system like that is hard as hell to predict and you can only determine what is REALLY right by doing one thing at a time, confirming the efficacy of each elemental change and then try them all at once on one final piece and see if you were correct. thats what takes the time.

now about the motor that the hot rod mag did.... sounds about right to me. if we are saying that they bought themselves about 60 hp with that work...

there is usually a couple or 3 % in just doing everything really right... and a 1/2 point of compression is the big answer to all of these motors.... you should run as much static mechanical compression ratio as the fuel you can buy will tolerate... that is the cheapest easiest way to make power... the dif between a 8.5 motor and a 9.5 motor is very very big and you can still run 87 fuel ... as for porting stock motors.... there is no one size fits all answer... port and intake VELOCITY are the key to making flow/hp... period... once you make the ports too big or shaped wrong on a normally aspirated motor , you are screwed. the motor will make less hp than stock.
having said that, if you are buying dart heads that have been designed by VERY smart and clever guys and then nc ported so they are essentially perfect out of the box that's one thing... on the other hand if you are getting some beater iron castings out of a junkyard , then you have to figure that unshrouding the valves, matching the ports and getting all the chambers the same size is going to be significant... and there are books about this written by yates and others like him that spell it all out... no magic here.

the trick is to make up your mind before you start what you want to do and what it will buy you to do it... i am in that bind right now... i have these box stock mag mpi 502's.... they make what ??? 425 hp or something ? now if i REALLY want to go significantly faster than the 63 mph im going now, how much power will i need and how much will it cost to get it.

the answer is a lot.... at least 100 more. the drag at 63 is big... both aero and hydro and the hp nec to overcome drag is the cube of the speed... so ... i can blow a grand per motor plus a lot of time on bells and whistles and and buy my self maybe 40 hp or so.... maybe... what will that buy me in performace over what i have now ? next to nothing... certainly nothing that would make me sit up and say " wow am i glad i did THAT "

nope... the next step would have to be 525 or more... and thats going to have to be a whole different configuration. and at 525 ide want to have better rods and pistons etc etc.... in FACT i would be doing exactly what the guy i GOT the motors from is doing... he wanted 600.... and he is 15 grand down the road into each... and he isn't done yet...

so... bottom line short answer ? make up your mind FIRST ... then build to a plan using good and well proven combinations and multi port fuel injection.... then enjoy the ride.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

Stevexsm,thanks for your detailed answers,we DO need more sensible/knowledable guys in this tech section.Back to the 502 mpi itake plenum package,like I said earlier,I had a expert head porter look at my then stock 502 mpi lower intake,measuring the smallest cross sectional area of the port and crunching the numbers the stock,untouched port mathematically outflows 99% of the head intake ports out there so other than intake port on manifold to intake port on head mismatch extrude honing should yield very little power increase. Where the design defieciency (and where I think arizona speed and marine gets a noticeable power increase for the 650$ they charge to port and mill a intake) is the 4 sets of pairs of intake runners "jut" up into the intake upper plenum above the floor .800 thousands of a inch and the air has to bounce around then turn 90 degrees to get into the lower manifold runners.If you pull the throttle body off one off your motors and look into the plenum you will see what I mean. I don't have a file photo of my manifold before I modified it but when you look at this pic of my manifold and see the 4 pairs of runners you can see where they are shiny and radiused with the divider also cut down and radiused. I mounted intake in a mill and cut .800 off the top of the runners,now when you set the upper plenum on it and look in it the transition is nice and round matching the plenum floor as close as possible. In the 502 mag motor build up I refered to they claimed when they did this it was worth around 20-25 hp. You'll have a better idea what fountainlast was talking about when you can see this on your own motor in person,Smitty

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

I just had AZSM do my manifold Smitty. What I was told is that in it's stock configuration it was only capable of supporting 750hp even with the supercharger. While I understand that it may a waste of time with a conventional manifold to extrude hone it, you and I are using the mpi manifolds in conjunction with superchargers. We both needed the stock manifold to flow more air, in it's stock form you can see that the runners come way too high into the plenum and have that plate in between the individual runners. The way they cut them down and cut part of that middle piece out as well as extrude honing them increases the amount of air flow we can stuff down the intake period. It's like buying a 550cmf carb and expecting it to produce 800hp. Not on the best built motor is it possible because it just can't flow enough air to do it. Take your plenum off Steve and look at it and then look at Smitty's pictures, I'll post pics of mine tomorrow, it's very similar to Smitty's(Articfriends). You'll see why we did it in the first place. I'm looking at 800/850 hp when I'm done with the rebuild which was not possible with the manifold in it's stock casting.
Smitty I know we talked before but I went ahead and ordered a set of ported Canfield heads with a bigger combustion chamber than my stock heads. I was told that I would create more hp by increasing the amount of combustion chamber and lowering my compression as opposed to doing the opposite in a n/a motor. I'll order my cam after I get my heads flowed so I can get some real numbers. I'm also ordering some Harlan Sharp roller rockers to with them. How the hell am I going to adjust them?

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

apples and oranges guys.... apples and oranges.

NOW i understand what you are talking about and i can tell you reasonably authoratatively that those protrusions into the plenum were originally developed on winston cup motors and work very very well in a normally aspirated motor... they make the curve fat and flat like hell across the board as opposed to being peaky and narrow which is what happens when you are trying to make big numbers with a restricted intake area... i would predict that if you took them out on a back to back on a stock motor w/ absolutely no other changes you would see an increase of maybe 15 hp at 5500 rpm and a loss of about 30 at 3500 to 4200 and i wouldn't be surprised is the total area under the curve was less and that the throttle response suffered substantially. at daytona in the draft at 7700 you might like it... at watkins glen , youde get your butt handed to you.

but you guys have superchargers... what YOU need for an intake manifold is essentially a sewer pipe ( exageration of course) that will flow , without any significant restriction at least 110 % of your rated blower output... and of COURSE you need a lower static mechanical compression ratio w/ blowers and turbos and the like.... GEEZE you probably make a dynamic 13 to 1 at speed which is why you need all that extra fuel curve..CERTAINLY to service the airflow but mostly to keep the piston tops cool enough to not melt into the pan in the first 30 nano seconds you run it....

two galactically different scenarios... you can litterally make as much horsepower as you want out of any size engine with supercharging and/or turbocharging.... i mean in the heady days of imsa and gtp , toyota was making roughly 1000 hp out of 1600 cc... thats a litre point six or just under 100 cubic inches.... they did it by running turbo boost numbers that were astronomical.... and the same was true in the early days of F1 and turbos.... making hp with blowers or turbos is not a matter of sophisticated air managment... it is a function of making everything strong enough and cool enough to withstand the monumental dynamic pressures you can now create internally and the stresses that result. i would suggest to you that the difference between a nice nc finish on the intake manifold and one that was done with a chain saw when run at 3 atmospheres of boost is absolute zero.

WHOLE dif ball game with normally aspirated...

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

A word about these cross ram intakes and supercharging. Those long runners were designed to boost torque down low for getting on plane. In fact you may remember that the 502 MPI engine came out at the same time as the Blackhawk and the Merc engineer interview that I read said that the intake created an extra little torque peak at 1500 RPM just so that the two big surfacing props wouldn't stall the engine when you tried to get on plane.

So if you want the same "look" to the torque curve just higher values, you keep the manifold more or less as is and increase air density with the blower. But if you want a higher revving, peakier torque curve switch to a single plane Holley EFI intake. Jim Shofner told me once that such a switch was worth 80 HP. But it isn't hard to figure out what you would give up.

Shortening the runners in the MPI intake sounds like a good solution that splits the difference between the stock intake and the single plane. As far as the intake only being good to a certain HP level, I don't buy it if you can increase boost. Dying after a certain RPM level I believe.

Something else to think about. At WOT the air is just whistling through the throttle body into that intake. I have to think the momentum of that air favors some runners more than others. This makes the plenum's job of spreading the air around equally more difficult.

On the HP500EFI intake, which is similar, we block off the throttle body flange, and bring air into the plenum from the top through an intercooler. This is nice laminar, slow moving air brought into the center of the plenum. I think this has to help volumetric efficiency, but I have no back to back testing to prove it since we are adding a blower at the same time.

This is the resulting HP curve with stock heads and cam, and I don't see any choking effect of the intake. I would like to plot articfriends curve along side this one just to look at the shapes.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

Steve,lets forget about supercharging for now,I was refering to modifying the intake runners in a N/A application. I dug up the Hot boat magazine article I was refering to (january thru april of 1997) and I was wrong in my memory of 20-25 hp gain from modifying the runners . The article goes in steps of modifications and at the point of modifying the intake the ignition timing had been optimized,headers had been added and the ecu re-programmed. The motor was making 554 ft lbs tq at 3800 vs 508 in stock form at 3800 and had gained 50 ft lbs tq at 3400 over stock and 31 ft lbs over stock at 4900 and corresponding amounts in between. These intake runners are quite long before any modifications(12 1/2 inches) and they shortened them .600 (leaving them sticking into intake plenum above floor .200) and also cut .500 out of the center dividers which leaves them effectively still 11.4 inches long.At the same time they had also done slight port clean up and bumped compression from 8.75 to 8.9 and added stiffer valve springs (for the cam change further in the article).They saw 5-10 ft lbs of increase tq acrossed the tested power band but how much came from the slight compression increase,how much they lost from the intake runner mod (if any) and how much power the stouter valve springs cost is only a guess.But no clear 30 hp loss from 3500-4200 and no 20-25 hp gain either,If I was fountainlast and was looking for most bang for buck I'd skip the intake mods and go with the headers and ecu mod ,Smitty

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

Tom,I plotted it out free hand hitting the cross points the best I could but its not super exact,Smitty
I could email you the graph and dyno sheet if you want to do a better graph,i was using the edit/paint feature and it took me several trys to get it even close to right.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

well... the steps they took sound completely well reasoned to me. a bit more compression , a bit more cam and some manfifold work that they knew from somewhere would work with that combination. sounds exactly correct... my point is/was that i don't think it was an accident that the left those 200 thou sitting above the floor...my " argument " to support my guess would be " look they are sitting there with their millng machine and just milled off the first 70 % , why would they stop there if making it ALL go away was better ? " i think they are illustrating exactly what i am trying to say. whats right is right and everything else is wrong to some degree. someone in that group, through a lot of time and effort figured out that with that combo, THOSE bumps were better than NO bumps. illustrates that just because something LOOKS wrong or doesn't SEEM to make sense doesn't mean that thats the case.

thats why god gives you dyno's tig welders and di grinders.

i would like to see the article.... can you e mail it to me ? [email protected] ?

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You mean like this Tom :D :D
Of course as you know all that pretty (ugly to you) tubing is going away and being replaced with your big toy next month :evilb: :evilb: :evilb:
Dave

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

I was just reiterating what was told from the shop, this manifold is actually going on BADKACHINA's 502 MAG with a vortec blower...

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

articfriends: Centrifugal blower engines have a characteristic curve don't they. I'm not sure why yours flattens out above 5500, maybe cam and intake, but it may have more to do with the compressor HP required at higher pulley ratios. That is an exponential curve and when you hit that wall it becomes the controlling factor. Too much power being used to spin the blower. Compressor HP is rarely measured but you can see this effect very clearly if you model the engine on Engine Analyzer Pro.

Hi Dave: No, I was talking about the intake runners; the intercooler plumbing is a whole other story. don't get me started. :rolleyes: Your engine and articfriend's engine are very similar except he uses the MPI intake and you use the Holley single plane EFI. A comparison of those two curves would be interesting to see if the single plane carries the torque peak at a higher RPM.

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stevesxm
You ever work with Keith Wilson? I agree with your "holistic" approach about building an engine, and I'm someone who has written more than 1 check to Extrude Hone.

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TC and Artic, Nice plots. What does your boost curve look like? Above 5000 rpm it gets more difficult to control belt slippage. What size blowers are these and would going up a size in blower help that above 5000 rpm?

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Marty,
You didn't ask but the one pictured is an old style M3 (M4 housing) and we spin it up to 5800-6000 rpm with a 12 rib belt and no slippage.
Dave

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

Tom,I drew those curves last night using my mouse,I couldn't make the lines perfect but they are real close,The tq doesn't really dip quite as much as my line did right after they intersect at 5250. It made 962 at 4500,942 at 5000,900 at 5500,853 at 5800. Here is my actual dyno graph from crockett on my old motor vs this one,Smitty

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The article is about 4-8 pages in each of 4 issues of hot boat (about 30-32 pages total).I will try to find the 2nd and 4th issues tonight and copy them onto my computer and e-mail them to you (and you guys that pm'd me) if I can find the other 2 issues.I'm susposed to be leaving for florida tommorrow if I can get a couple of loose ends tied up on transmission jobs I'm finishing tonight. If not it might be around the 3rd of Jan,Smitty

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

I took the .800 thous off mine and 1 inch out of the divider on my motor and a friends n/a 540 vs. the .600 and .500 because of the fact mine is blown and both of our motors are 540's vs the 502 (my reasoning was the extra cubic inches would give a "stronger" intake signal strength and they need more airflow etc). By the way,the n/a 540 is a torque monster down low but a turd above 4800 because my friend (who WILL NOT listen to anyones advice) called the isky cam "helpline" and they sold him a cam for his 540 that is SMALLER than a bone stock 502!!! Smitty

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

Sorry,no boost curve. Tyler has a nice modern dts dyno but you have to watch your boost on a little gauge mounted in his dyno room so no graph or anything. I run a 12 rib drive and keep it pretty tight,m-3sc compressor. Tried some pulls with race gas,colder plugs and a smaller pulley but results were almost identical,I think I changed too much at once and i was nervous to try more boost with the hot plugs and 92 octane so either I had belt slippage or the colder plugs and race gas made less power that cancelled out the extra power the extra boost should have made. Plus he removes the wideband 02 sensors when your running race gas so I didn't want to chance making many pulls in that form,Smitty

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Smitty,
What cam are you running. Just curious. I think we're set up pretty similar.
Thanks,
Dave

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You guys are talking a different laguage to me now. I trust AZSM and they advised me on the intake manifold. Here's a pic of their work.

Re: Extruded Honed?
 

If you took your air compressor and put an attachment to blow air (the kind with the handle and the changeable fittings), held the trigger open and drained your full air compressor would it take longer than if you took a knife and cut the end off the hose completely? If it does wouldn't that be because through the attachment there is more restriction thus allowing less air to pass through it as opposed to the hose being wide open with absolutely no restriction at all?

I'm just asking because it would make sense to me that in a blower application with a manifold designed for 420 hp you would think the blower could be capable of making more hp than the manifold is capable of no matter how much you increased the pressure. I'm just telling you what AZSM and another builder advised me. They both said that the stock manifold would be the most restrictive part of the entire engine after I changed the heads. The heads, the headers, the the blower are all capable of more hp than that stock manifold can handle. Thus back to my earlier post regarding putting a 500cmf carb on a 800 hp motor. It cannot create the hp with that carb even if it's under procharger carburetor assembly and you were forcing air through it.

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Heres my "home" version of what you had done. What does AZSM claim the work gives a 502 over a stock manifold,Smitty

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They claimed they gained 30 hp on the dyno on a stock motor with the change. Could be b/s? I wasnt' there, but they have a pretty good reputation and after the work they've done for me, I trust them.