Anyone ever seen this? Noticed tonight that on my evans intake they eliminated some of the mounting holes...youd think this might cause sealing issues, right? Thought it was interesting!
Just a thought, looks like more m*** where the bolts are missing. Being that it bolts down flat, I’d liken it to a (gasp) LS based engine with 6 bolts holding the intake down. That said my intake gaskets “let go” but I had around 180k on the engine at the time. I’d bet you’ll be fine.
Check your block. You might find that it is not even drilled for all the holes that the Fenton manifold has. When I built my flathead ('50 Ford) I drilled and tapped holes in the block to match the extra holes in the Edlebrock intake.
My Flathead Edmunds Racing manifold has a few holes missing too. Seen the same on other manifolds as well.
Yep. If your 8BA block has the extra holes, you can bet they are not from the factory. I imagine that the powers that be at Ford decided to save a little on every block. It ads up over time. That being said, I've never had a vacuum leak on a properly ***embled engine, even with the manifolds with extra holes.
It appears that the intake runners were joined instead of kept individual which may provide a better path to the engine. Those single p***ages look pretty small.
As a point of interest I have a Sharp 4BBL manifold for an 8BA. Surprisingly, it has two holes in the manifold that have no corresponding holes in the block, and one tapped hole in the block with no corresponding hole in the manifold (or vice-versa). Because of this, the only thing I have used it for was my "Quadra Jet to Flathead" experiment (which did not end well). I suspect it was a large manifold vacuum leak, but never got it running well enough to fully check that out.
^^^^This. My 8BA did not have as many holes as my Navarro intake. To keep it looking good I cut off a couple bolts and glued them to the manifold so there wouldn't be empty holes.
That looks like a fairly stiff piece of aluminum so I wouldn't hesitate to try it. But I'll also refer you to the book by Leak Erickson, "How to Stuff a Gasket".
I thought 59AB and 8BA manifolds would inter change but you have to select/omit/add the few studs that didn't match.
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