Making my own intake manifold!

As the Polo was still running and I could not strip anything off the car for the build, I went to the shop that sold me the previous set of throttle bodies. Luckily they had another set and the price wasn’t that bad. At this stage, the Toyota throttle bodies were getting scares. Luckily the guy who sold it to me didn’t jack up the price.

Making an intake manifold…

Now I had a partial intake manifold and throttles. I took the standard intake and machined the runners off at an angle so that I could machine an adapter part that I could then just weld to the intake again. I designed the parts on our 3D CAD software at work and then machined them after hours.

This was a bit of a time-consuming part to make and there were 4 of them. I first turned the blank on a lathe and then machined the flange detail in a conventional milling machine. Now I had four adapters and a machined intake manifold. I was a bit worried about the parts not being straight on the manifold and the throttle shafts not lining up properly. I designed a 10-millimeter thick mild steel flange that I could bolt the 4 adapter parts into. This meant that they would be lined up properly and the mild steel plate was nice and thick so that the assembly could not pull that much when welding them. Aluminum is one of these materials that I like to pull when welding.

So now I only had to weld the parts together. First I tried to tig weld on another piece of plate as I didn’t want to mess up my parts. I attempted to weld the manifold once I got the hang of it. I wasn’t as easy as welding the clean plates. The problem was that the manifold was a cast part which means the aluminum is not that clean. I eventually got it welded properly and it looked really good. I didn’t need to grind any welding to make it look good.

This worked put well!