[quote=Stanton]Just wondering about the possibilities of plastic high performance intakes. Unlike aluminum intakes where the sand molds take a lot of time and labor and the castings have to go through a machining process, plastic products come out of the molds pretty much "ready to ship" and the production process is much faster. The big expense is the finely finished molds.
You can budget for an easy $700k+ for injection mold tooling on that. [/quotI
I am somewhat surprised by 700k? I've had some experience supporting high end mold making. The most expensive I have seen was a 64 cavity, hydraulically rotated mold. I think it ran 900k including hydraulics for rotation and core pulls, it weighed over 10k pounds. It spits out plastic jars that appear to be glass. I realize jars are not intakes but the polishing these molds require exceed anything a intake would require. Not sure if a book mold could be made for intakes but based on low volume it would be something to consider!
Red
