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Building a Plastic Intake Manifold for a Ford Focus ST
I thought I would start a new topic here as there will be some machining done on this part. I made this gray gasket/template by removing the stock intake manifold, putting in all the mounting bolts and then tapping around the ports with a ball peen hammer. The sharp edges of the head casting cut the intake ports. My nephew James was a great help in Removing and Replacing the manifold.
I noticed that the stock Ford Plastic Intake manifold has metal inserts to prevent the bolts that attach it to the head from compressing the plastic. This eventually would lead to a loose bolt. I have ordered some inserts from McMaster-Carr.com that may work. I also ordered some threaded inserts for plastic that can be used to attach items to the manifold.
Work proceeds on 3/18/2008
We made an 8 mm pilot from .5 inch drill rod. Drilled it .125 then .128 for a light fit of a 1.25 inch transfer punch. We used this and the gasket template to center punch the mounting holes. These were then center punched with a larger punch. The photo shows the pilot and center punch laying on the ABS plastic flange. The wiggler is installed in the milling machine (or large drill press) to drill the holes out for smooth metal inserts.
3/20/2008
We made great progress today. We set the manifold flangeon the adjustable angle table. A sketch showed I needed a 24 degree angle on the outer holes and 13.5 degree angle on the two inner runners. I used a dial protractor and buble level (the mill table is level) to set the angle on the work piece. We cut the first hole with only minor problems. A huge volume of chips was produced which we cleared by hand with the machine stopped or running. Never do this by hand on steel chips. We got a nice clean hole with a good surface finish on the wall, ready to be solvent welded to my 2 inch ABS tube runners. I did shoot a video it is posted above.
John
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