Reply to "Got a Blue Thunder Intake Laying Around?"

> Dan, you mentioned the dyno results of all but the Edelbrock Torker.
> How good/bad did it do?

The Torker did pretty well. It was better than the ported Ford intake
on horsepower and within 5 HP or so of the Strip Dominator but IIRC the
Strip Dominator and Ford intake both made more torque. The Torker
seemed to like the extra cubic inches. In previous testing by a
couple of Pantera club members on stock stroke engines, the Torker
did poorly. Tim did a bunch of drag and road testing of 351C-4V
intakes. His engine consisted of an Erson hydraulic flat tappet cam
(232 deg duration @ 0.050", 108 LSA, 0.545" lift), Rhoads lifters, 4V
quench heads, flat top pistons, 735 Holley, coatings, C&A rings, MSD
ignition, wrapped headers, and MPG Stinger exaust port stuffers. Intakes
tested included an Edelbrock Torker, Weiand Xcelerator 4V, Offy
Port-o-Sonic 4V, Holley Strip Dominator, along with a couple dual
planes. Tim spent a lot of time optimizing the carb for each intake.
The Holley Strip Dominator was 4 tenths quicker in the 1/4 mile than
the Torker and had, by far, the best driveability (smooth with no flat
spots) of the single planes. It rivaled the dual planes down low, as
far as driveability was concerned, and by 3000 RPM was pulling away.
He could never get the Torker to smooth out at lower RPM, despite a lot
of tuning time. Unfortunately, he didn't have access to a Blue Thunder
dual plane for those tests. Note that the single planes tend to be
more sensitive to carb tuning due to the weaker metering signal and Tim
was using a 735 Holley with the Ford truck boosters. A 3310 vacuum
secondary Holley with the straight boosters might not work as well on
the single planes with their weaker booster signals.

> Did you ever dyno the Edelbrock Scorpion?

No I didn't have one of those. My guess would be that it would behave
like the Torker with a 2" open spacer. I did bring along an Edelbrock
A331 which is a raised port version of the Torker that matches A3 Ford
Motorsport high port heads but did not test it. During mock up, it
looked like the A331 wouldn't seal at the bottom of the port without
milling it to drop it down, so we passed on testing it.

Dan Jones