Mopar Engine Intake Manifold Comparison - Max Wedge On The Bench

The Indy dual-plane manifold showed that it can flow plenty of air. It had lower flow numbers than any of the Indy single planes, but it had higher flow than the Victor 440. The dual-plane manifolds tend to have significant differences in flow from port to port since the runners vary in length and shape. We wish Indy would make this manifold with a 4500 bolt pattern. Lots of people are building 500-plus-inch street stroker motors these days, and they could use a big carburetor/big dual-plane combination.

We got our hands on a bad boy 440-3 manifold with the large Dominator flange. Interesting enough, it didn't flow quite as much air as the smaller Indy manifold that is designed for the 4150-style carburetor. We'll have to wait for the dyno numbers to see if the flow numbers correspond to the power numbers.

Just to see what would happen, we bolted an original '67 440 HP manifold to our testbed. The flow numbers were pathetic when compared to the modern single planes. This old Hustle Stuff dual-plane didn't fare much better than the factory dual plane, but sure weighs a lot less.

While we were playing around with standard-port, dual-plane manifolds, we decided to bolt on a Performer RPM, just for good measure. This is a great manifold that works well with any street performance build. The numbers were about the same as the cross-ram and very close to the Victor 440 numbers. for even more fun, we bolted on a 1050 Dominator to see what would happen. Basically this carb is so large and flows so well, the flow numbers didn't change a bit with it installed.

While testing different combinations of spacers and adapters, we were surprised to see the flow bench liked the addition of a clover leaf spacer on top of the 4500 to 4150 adapter. It doesn't look like it would flow well since there is a large step in the plenum, but the flow numbers went up every time we dropped this clover leaf spacer into position. We'll have to try it sometime in the car to see if it also picks up power at the track.

Finally, we located an old Edelbrock CH440 manifold to test. These manifolds are a low-rise dual plane with a 4500 carb flange on them. This one didn't flow all that well, but it got us thinking about how cool it would be if Edelbrock would produce a Performer RPM with the big 4500 bolt pattern.

This graph shows the results of the intakes with the Max Wedge-size ports.

This graph shows the results of the intakes with standard port sizing.