How to True and Intake Manifold

Why:

Making sure your intake manifold is true and flat is critical to ensure a proper seal to the head and smoothly operating throttle control.  Two things that are no fun are:

1. Tiny vacuum leaks that throw off your EFI mapping.  A flat & true manifold ensures that the Gaskets seal by creating the same amount of pressure across the entire gasket surface not just in spots.  Turbo applications are worse than N/A, but they are equally important, and the Head side of the manifold needs to be done as well.

2. Sticky throttle pedal action, or worse, shaft binding with multiple ITBs in a row.  Our Throttle Couplings allow some flex so the shafts don't have to be perfectly aligned, but you need to get very close to ensure trouble-free operation year-in-year-out.

Truing the manifold is time well spent to avoid these issues  First and foremost, the way to get a truly flat manifold is using a milling machine, surface grinder or at your local head/machine shop.  Now if you do not have access to those do not despair, it’s not hard!

Looking at the Manifold below it looks pretty flat huh? After all it is a brand new. 

Take a Look Now:

Notice the Shiny areas, these are high spots on the manifold. The right side has them too, but they are not showing up in the picture. These high spots needed to be removed, even from a New Manifold! Now how do we correct this and why do we need to correct this? It’s simple.

How:

All you really need is some tape, a piece of 220 Sand Paper, and a clean, flat surface Simply move the part back and forth across the sand paper until you have a nice “EVEN” finish! Remember to clean the table first, the spot of cheese from the pizza that’s now under the paper will cause a Groove worse than when you started! 

Taped down piece of 220 Sand Paper:

What A Trued mounting surface for throttle Bodies looks like:

The above step took less than 10 minutes and can save you money, valuable time, and help eliminate tuning headaches!