after sleeping on this, maybe the question needs to be rephrased...
i think we can all agree any port alignment mismatch would obviously need to be corrected. in my case, the ports match up fine, just that the head port is larger than runners, which means that just matching them, at the point of gasket may be useless?? I assume in this case the entire runners all the way to the plenum would need to be matched - do people do that?? is that what porting the intake means?
You're in the right track. Some people "bellmouth" the intake so it matches the head. That is probably close to useless. Hughes Engines offers what they call a deep port match where they go a couple of inches back into the intake and match to the gasket. It costs a few hundred dollars for that type of work. Wilson Manifolds will take it a few steps past that with full runner porting as well as plenum porting. A full competition port job from Wilson on an intake manifold is usually more than $1000.
