How to Install an Intake Manifold - Roadkill Extra

hey it's freiberger here from roadkill and engine masters and I'm about to show you a sample episode of this how to build your first engine series that we've been doing on motor trend on demand it's me and Steve dulcet showing you just basics of assembling your very first engine we're doing them every Monday Wednesday and Friday on motor trend ondemand.com here's a sample episode well this is it - I'll check our very last installment on the engine series I can't wait to hear it run I know that's gonna be a long time from now but what we're gonna do is show you how to install an intake manifold and that will be the end of all the tips and tricks that we've been giving you on this 360 small-block Mopar go back and look at roadkill extras over the past several weeks and you're gonna find a lot of stuff about the whole assembly of this whole thing we haven't shown you every single little detail about what you need to do to assemble an engine but I think we've gone into pretty good depth on the subject we did cover I think we covered it pretty well yeah I think that if I was a guy and I saw every single one of those I could probably put this motor together would you feel empowered oh yeah yeah yeah okay so what are we gonna do throw this intake manifold on more of it first I want to take these tabs off the cylinder head gaskets have these tabs to hold that'll work you want to take them off I just fold them over you know put your finger on on that so that you can smash me hold it all the way down okay you trust me now don't let go there we go okay so if that little tab he just broke off is part of the head gasket and normally it would hold down the cork that goes right here wherever it is this cork see if it even has a hole in it but he's taken it off because we're gonna have to test fit the intake manifold before we start and also I just don't like those tabs even to hold down the cork yeah even when I used a cork okay so you probably would never have guessed that chisel and Hammer would be part of an intake manifold install I didn't see that coming no ok the intake manifold we're going to install here is an L brock RP air-gap high-rise dual plane with an air passage underneath all of the runners right here this is the intake that we like for most street engines and we're gonna make sure that it's all clean and tidy and as a matter of fact man you clean this thing up good no I know I'd spend a little time there looks new yeah it was you only the best for our 360 so it's all clean the heads are all clean and we are gonna drop it on here as a test fit because when you use head gaskets of various thicknesses when you deck the block when you mill the cylinder heads it all affects how the whole package bolts together and changes the shape of this v-shape right here and you can end up with problems such as the bolt holes not lining up or the gap down here touching the block all sorts of things like that but I think we're gonna get away with this tool it's gonna be pretty tight once you get the gaskets in there yeah it's gonna be right at the bottom of the bowls I can tell you that right now so let's stack the gasket and have a look you know the doors you might have to kind of hold that gasket up as you're putting manifold in okay huh at the ersite looks pretty good yeah I think it's gonna be okay yeah I was expecting much worse so what would you do to fix it if those were all offset you know we're looking down the bolt holes to make sure that the hole in the cylinder head isn't like this with the hole in the intake manifold would you just oblong all the holes in the intake and go to town it depends if I have a dyno test the next morning and I'm it's like three o'clock three hours past midnight yeah I would pull out the carbide cutter and start hogging but really on most of your v8 engines if you mill the heads or deck the block a certain amount you pretty much have to take almost the same amount off of the intake face that's if in the intake face is at a right angle to the deck now this isn't exactly a right angle so it might be for every 10,000 so you take off the deck you take nine and a half up thing but it's pretty much one-to-one is it yeah I thought it was a little more complicated than that now this gaskets in my way but I think the bolt holes line up well you can always tell by doing two diagonal ones if you can get to two corners in that that's gonna be no problem now the other thing that we look at that's really critical is this gap right here between the bottom of the intake and the top of the block both on the front and the back we'll sort of eyeball the size of that because if it's touching it's bad because then it's hold the intake up and if it's huge you know you got to deal with something one way or another here are the quarks that are provided with your gaskets set which are supposed to go there if I slide this right here I can see that that cork still dangles kind of freely in there so I have two options one would be what we normally do on the dyno which is take that Permatex gray this is their new optimum gray and this is a more rigid sealer than the black which is like their best oil seal and it's more flexible but because this is more rigid we sometimes will use only a bead of the gray to seal both ends but I think in this case we're probably gonna slap down the Cork's and yeah get them with some black well there's gonna be some compression I bet you that once we get this fully installed it's gonna compress the course quark so I would still skin them with some black though just to make sure cuz we're actually putting it in the car I won't let you you won't why not because this is gonna seal perfectly along the cork I'll just put a little bit in the corners okay I'm telling it's gonna be fine trust me all right I love it when he just gives in to my demands like that are you done with the pre-fit yeah okay so that's coming back off you know what's really handy about these gaskets is they come with like an adhesive backing so you can stick them on they won't slip out of place lined it up perfectly in the corners first you should have trimmed it you think sometimes those are a little long and they'll buckle in the middle yeah but you can see what's gonna be critical is this corner right here it's got to get some sealant on order that's gonna be fubar okay so you got that stuck down it's sitting flat in the corners I'm pretty satisfied with that yeah and you have the front one in your hand yep slam that down this is a fel Pro intake manifold set and the gasket itself they call a print toe seal and if you're working on aftermarket cylinder heads sometimes the port window is larger than what the factory would have offered and so fel-pro or mr. gasket has aftermarket gaskets for all of those different heads so when you put the gasket down one thing you want to do is definitely make sure that it's not intruding on your port window and on that note when your intake manifolds being mocked up you saw us just tested a little while ago if you've got a single plane intake you can take a flashlight and look through and check your port alignment from the intake manifold to the port on the cylinder head and just make sure that it's not hideous you know a little bit of offset and stuff we've dyno tested that before and I think gasket matching is pretty overrated but it depends on how much it's actually intruding you can use some rubber cement to hold this in place yeah a little contact cement are you gonna let me put a little RTV around the water ports yeah okay so he is gonna lay down some contact cement and with these print Oh seal gaskets they're called that because they've got this blue sort of raised rubber part on them and theoretically they seal without any sealer whatsoever but we usually take the extra precaution with the Permatex gray and just put a little thin swipe around each water jacket or water port EGIS just there's the fine thing because sometimes those leak and then it's a real pain in the neck you got to do the whole job all over again for a burger I might have to explain myself about this contact adhesive okay I'm ready I'm not working for a newspaper and laying out stuff old-style the thing is when you put the gasket up against a head and then you drop the manifold in place and the bolt art snugged up sometimes that can pull the gasket down and out of position so I like to just put some contact adhesive right around the where the bolt holes are just to tack that gasket in place I'll also put a DAB on the gasket so once the two come together it will be assured that it's not gonna slip it's not pretty much cover do you ever do that David yep sometimes I'll just do that with a dab of silicone or I'll trust the water port silicon too to take care of it for me okay do you want to use the black or the gray in the corners now I'll let you choose I have to admit I only recently discovered that the black is the most oil resistant Permatex but I've always used the gray so that's what I'm gonna do right now ready yeah hit the gray in the corners and then I'll squish the gasket yep into that recesses you got to get this recess sort of filled in there you don't need to fully glopitt but you definitely want to shove that RTV down how do you feel about that I think that's excellent okay let me do the same thing here oh yeah that's gonna ensure a complete seal yeah you know they call it stuff gasket maker I know just because you instant gas getting a tube okay I think the ceiling area is back here I think it is mm-hmm does were down I didn't see that that with that that's alright Freiburger on it you trust it right yeah okay Steve was getting anxious well the thing about contact adhesive is once you make contact it's going to be to fix the gasket in position yeah yeah look at that dipping the ends in and boom making sure all the bolt holes line up we're doing extra precision here if you watch us on our engine masters show you'll see on the Oh Dino will just I didn't puts the graph the stuff together but my heaviest were being careful sorry what I haven't put the gasket adhesive you did oh I did yeah okay you mean the rubber cement yeah yeah it was all on there see it's fixed I'm sorry for having doubted you forever drew I know okay now I'm gonna go back and put another dab of our TV I think you did a better job than I did probably yeah goes without saying but my sides alright Billy yeah okay now I'm gonna do just another little dab here where these corners meet because that is the place where I'm most likely to get a leak oh that one looks pretty good that one looks pretty good you see those slots where the little tab that we eliminated would normally go yeah I like putting a dime in there yeah okay fill that up oh man that's a nice technique you're using so you're not gonna let me skin it with black at all no no okay that's that one up a little bit all right do you want to put some gray around the water ports on this side are you gonna trust the print Oh seal I would trust to print to seal but I'm gonna admit let you make that call are you gonna grease the gaskets on the intake comes on no no okay um I'm gonna put a light skin just because I want that assurance you know what I mean right fill your leak here we'll allow water to pour into the lifter Valley which leads to the hole lubrication system so you really don't want a water leak you do not understand doing a really thin skin on here one of the problems with having two RTV it on like this is that when you do change the intake manifold that makes it more difficult but in a permanent installation for actually putting the engine in a car instead of the dyno I think it's worth it oh yeah definitely it's just that we always end up changing stuff so I know then you have to clean it all up every single time okay you want to drop it on I'm gonna make a note about something before we put that on okay a factory solar head has an exhaust crossover right here and because there's a corresponding passage that goes right across the intake manifold and then there's another exhaust crossover in the head now these heads and the intake as well they don't have the exhaust crossover but om parts do and a lot of times guys will think well these gaskets don't have a hole so they block off the exhaust crossover but it'll blow right through I can assure you within ten minutes of running there's gonna be a big hole there and a big hole there because the gas could cannot take that kind of heat some kits come with a little metal plug that you can put in there but I would always block the crossover for a performance application oh for sure they make the carburetor like hot and oil and all sorts of stuff you can put a thin piece of sheet metal behind this gasket yeah and this gaskets got enough compressibility and that would solve the problem I've cut it out of like beer cans and stuff for those usually wrought through okay are you ready to drop it on yep okie dokie now we try and aim as we go to get it to drop in place right the first time so that we're not you need to be more oh yeah okay you're good yeah I'm good so that we're not moving it around afterwards because it's better not to okay now it gets into the conversation about tightening it all down oh do you want to put some sealant on these the bolt holes on these heads go clear through to oil knot in the four corners only I lay on the inners okay so let's seal the inners so the oil can work its way up the threads and just make a mess out of it later so I'm gonna keep my eye on these torques to make sure that I like how they squish ooh I think it's gonna be really good oh yeah yeah I started talking about tighten the bolts down the factory manuals will tell you a sequence a torque sequence of how you're supposed to install these but kind of like we did on the cylinder heads we're pretty sure you can just start in the middle and work your way around you know what I'm actually having an alignment problem here even after all that checking you might have to bash this over a bit yeah feel this bolt once you pull it down with the speed handle littlez you haven't risked a gasket enough look at the alignment yeah you got to get a couple on there got one a sealer do you care yeah try and get that one in there so instead of doing the factory pattern we'll just end up with speed wrench rubbing them all down and then taking a wrench and just by hand not by torque wrench sort of zinging it all down and I think that that will be about all there is to installing that intake right yeah see that you know what that means right that's a wrap on this entire series that we've done on this engine that's pretty good I feel like we covered things adequately pretty quickly huh adequate is good enough well I don't want to have like a show inflation but I guess it's true yeah so what's the future of this engine well the intent of it is to go in the car from roadkill garage that's called vanishing paint it's a 1970 Dodge Challenger it's that green one that's all rusty and clapped out looking and what we really want to do is put a stick behind this thing and do some basic suspension mods and try and go out there and actually run against a brand new challenger and win I don't know if we will or walk oh we will we want to do that on just a regular basic working guys budget which is exactly what this engine is there's nothing trick here everything that we've done in the entire series you can easily do yourself you might have to buy some tools from power house some of the specialized stuff but overall this is as easy as it gets pretty much yeah yeah Mopar small blocks are among the simpler engines but I think what we showed people applies to a lot of different engines as well except for maybe the shaft rocker system so there you go that is a wrap on the roadkill extra series of engine building tech tips if you need more roadkill extra go sign up right now you [Music]

Channel: MotorTrend Channel

Views: 475,807

Keywords: How to Build Your First Engine Series, engine project, installing the intake manifold, tech advice, Mopar V-8, how to install, how to assemble, vanishing paint challenger project, deck height

Id: bmDc8sQJQkI

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Nariek]

My intake manifold looks a little different..

For real though, this has been a pretty good series of engine building basics.

[u/gimpwiz]

We are truly in the golden age of educational content for (among other things) cars. This is amazing.

Between Roadkill, Engine Masters, ... I should really just sign up and pay them a few bucks a month.