Jay Wellwood

Perhaps your welding skills are top shelf and you have time to spare.

Me? Not so much. Glad to take the short bus for this ride.

blade7

Yep and yep. And I like to know that the bus driver knows where he's going too.

333pg333

One wonders if the LR piece is superior to the more traditional log style intake why more OEMs or even aftermarket part companies haven't followed suit? Perhaps packaging is the main constraint? I'd also hazard a guess that forced induction combined with high quality fuel injection and clever ECU's make searching for the 'perfect' intake redundant. Having said that, I've read polarising comments on the LR piece. More likely to do with the short runners than the actual design.

V2Rocket

I don’t think they necessarily did anything wrong there either.

The last 10 years or so of VW 1.8/2.0 turbo engines have an intake quite similar to the LR piece and seem to do ok.

As Patrick says, most of the criticism from a long time ago was about the power curve due to the short runners.

Jay Wellwood

Cool. When it's your bus, your call.

In the meantime, get off my bus.

blade7

All I have to put forward is the Ford Sierra Cosworth inlet manifold, I'm assuming a lot of testing went into the design by Cosworth. That design was pretty much unchanged from 200 bhp road cars to 550+ bhp race cars, other than by sticking an extra 4 injectors into it. I also had it on pretty good authority that Mountune experimented with the internals of the manifold on the race engines, without much gain.

blade7

Perhaps you're going to be thrown under the bus.

Thom

Wether an engine is running under vacuum, under atmospheric pressure or under boost will not affect pulse waves taking place as inlet valves open and close, which means that equalling flow between runners is always preferable to just shoot for equal length runners, fit them with the same size bellmouths, strap around them a plenum designed to just fit into the engine bay and hope for the best.
This is not saying that static flow measurements on a flow bench are telling all but they remain IMO the strict minimum to make sure that the intake manifold is not the weak link in the whole inlet tract, should the way the engine runs not meet expectations.
I had a LR intake on a flow bench and it did ok in terms of peak flow compared with how much a heavily prepped 2V head can flow even if the figures were not as balanced as one may want, and the fastest 2V engine I have ever driven (now making 600 euro hp) uses a LR intake. When all is said and done the bottom line is that it remains an off the shelf solution that works. Perhaps the Hayward intake works even better, I don't know, and I see no reason why it should not. I had one and was looking forward to testing it on my 3L 8v but it took a year to be delivered, and that was after my 16V engine came to life so I just sold it along.

ETA : the runners on the Hayward intake are nicely tapered with wide bellmouths on their inlet, whilst the runners on the LR intake are constant section with tiny radius bellmouths on their inlet. The Hayward intake should therefore feature a stronger ram effect than the LR's, but that is not measurable statically on a flow bench.

Penguinracer

I’d also consider the following when choosing between a 2.5 / 2.7 / 3 litre configurations:

(1) Rod / Stroke ratio;
(2) Crankshaft stiffness;
(3) Peak piston speed;
(4) Piston / Rod /Crankshaft / Flywheel mass;
(5) Harmonics of the reciprocating masses;
(6) Valve shrouding;
(7) Inertia of the reciprocating masses (rev-ability).

blade7

Doesn't the 968 rev highest from the factory?