You must be one of those ass hats who think they know everything about everything. You probably call Microsoft tech support and tell them how to do there job huh.
Keep in mind that it only takes one teaspoon of arsenic in your breakfast cereal for about a month to kill you. You will want to use two teaspoons of arsenic to be sure and do the job effectively. Goddamn useless pile of cocksucker.
So if everyones concern with the C&L is heat transfer why doesn't someone cut a phenolic spacer for each side of the manifold to keep the head from transferring heat to it? I know someone has to have the ability to do that around here.
Here's a nice little tidbit about heat retention and transfer. Everybody remember when Hurricane Performance did the 440hp three valve car? They actually tested the car at operating temperature and then iced the intake manifold & re-tested the car again.
It gained 7 hp. Yup.....seven horsepower by icing the intake. Heat retention is a funny thing. Plastic does it too. Hell....here's the breakdown:
The breakdown is as follows: The car made 409 rear wheel HP with the stock intake manifold and factory throttle body. With the installation of CMVC delete plates, it made 410 rear wheel HP. They then added a GT500 throttle body and horsepower went up to 414 HP. With the C&L intake manifold installed, horsepower went up to 429 HP with the GT500 throttle body and 435 HP with a single blade throttle body (showing that the GT500 throttle body was holding performance back) at full manifold operating temperature. At 6,900 RPM in this same test, the C&L manifold made 36.3 more HP than the stock manifold setup at full operating temperature. To see how much more power could be gained by cooling the intake manifold, they iced it down and let it sit for 30 minutes, bringing the temperature of the manifold way down to a level that could only be achieved in the dead of winter. Peak horsepower increased by only 6.68 HP (442.58 vs 435.90), supplying a maximum gain over the stock setup of 41.7 HP at 6,900 RPM.
There you have it, kids. Independent testing by a supporting vendor on this board. It is not realistic for anyone to drive around with a bag of ice on top of any manifold, and if they did, they would be rewarded with an improvement of roughly 7 HP. At wide open throttle, the air traveling through the manifold is moving at a high velocity, so very little thermal transfer can take place. Any airflow that DOES make contact with the manifold walls provides a cooling effect to the intake manifold, and air intake temperatures (as measured within the manifold itself) will typically drop by around 50 degrees or so at WOT. If the plastic manifold DID keep the air intake temperatures substantially lower than an aluminum manifold (and it doesn't), then you are obsessing over a fraction of the roughly 7 HP that can be gained by fully icing down the manifold. Obviously, a plastic manifold sitting directly on top of an engine that is running at 195 degress operating temperature with a closed hood is nowhere near the temperature of an aluminum manifold that has had a bag of ice laying on top of it for 30 minutes...
After all, how many 96-00 2v 4.6L composite intakes cracked before they finally admitted a problem?
'Bout a million of them. Give or take.
there are rumors ford re-called some of these for unknown reasons, and thats why there was a shortage.... is this true? if so they should have a list of s/n# or something.
Warpage at the throttle body mounting flange.
4. Everyone jumped on the "listen to SD and buy a aluminum paper weight because SD said it was better" bandwagon? (No offense SD, but people seem to blindly follow your lead a lot here.)
Probably because I know what I'm talking about. With two engineering degrees and a lifetime of engine building/racing I'd venture to guess that I'm not wrong on too many things. Except women. Nobody can figure that shit out. And the C&L intake is 15 pounds more than a stock intake. Not a huge hit in my book.
Ten's of thousands of these things sold...
Really? Tens of thousands? You sure? I know for a fact that one supporting vendor on this board has had a pre-sale going for some time and, to date, has sold seven intakes. One of which went to an employee. The number obtained by several sources inside Ford is 2400 were made.
How long did it take for C&L to release there marginal (at best) product?
Marginal. You betcha. With 127300 cams and the intake we gained 28 hp. With stock cams and a single 67mm turbo at 8 psi we gained 44 hp. With stock cams and twin 53mm turbos at 8 psi we gained 52 hp. With a P1SC ProCharger at 10 psi and stock cams we gained 41 hp. Turning the twin 53's up to 14 psi we saw a 66 hp gain....right until the rods went bouncing around the dyno area. Marginal. Yeah. I'll take that kind of "marginal" all damn day long. Perhaps you should test the intake before you trash it openly. I bet you'd call Pam Anderson a bad lay since you'd never get your dick anywhere near her.
How many revisions were there?
One.
How many people hardly gained anything from them?
Only the people who somehow got their hands on a
pre-production intake that was supposed to be out for testing & evaluation only but somehow was
SOLD by certain shops to individuals.
Seems like the OP and some other's aren't using a lot of logic is all.
Pot...I'd like you to meet Kettle.
Here's something to consider. With regard to "tincanning", people on the thread might think that the manifold is "growing" in size due to pressure. In fact, what is ACTUALLY happening is you are watching the manifold return to it's normal shape/state. When the throttle body is closed, the vacuum that is present within the manifold is pulling the thin walls of the plastic "inward" towards the center of the manifold. So, when the vehicle is at idle, the manifold is in a deformed state. As soon as the throttle body is opened, the vacuum is removed from the manifold and it "grows" back to it's normal size/shape.
Also, a
nyone who thinks that a thin wall plastic manifold is going to keep heat out of the engine any better than a manifold made from another type of material needs to understand that EVERYTHING under the hood gets heated by the engine, even plastic. And for the person who thinks that the computer will "sense" the manifold is made from a different material and retard the timing, well, the ONLY air temperature sensor on the vehicle is located within the mass airflow sensor WELL BEFORE the air enters the intake manifold. The computer has no frame of reference for what the temperature actually is within the intake manifold. Anyone who understands that ALL manifolds get hot, regardless of what they are made of, will realize that there is not a substantial gain to be made from using a plastic intake manifold and the above dyno results clearly show that manifold temperature does not provide a substantial gain in performance. The PRIMARY advantage to running a plastic intake manifold (besides low cost per unit manufacturing costs once the tooling has been created) is weight. 
