Still looks like an attempt to clone a Victor to me.... but not a good attempt.

Because a non metal intake keeps the air/fuel mixture cooler and saves some weight. Like a thermo quad carb... call it a thermo quad intake??

Local drift team got 3d printed intake manifold for they nascar engine - look 31:40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNh_yoxVDZI

A few years back a guy I know got a Chinese knock off intake for his chiivy truck and something was off because it kept burning the tip off a spark plug on the same cylinder many times but he changed back to the stock 4 BBL intake and it stopped

Thanks Hessu, that is what I am talking about.. I don't know what they are saying (my Finnish is rusty lol) but do they say what it weighs? I would make a guess it would be maybe 15 pounds lighter than an aluminum version?

The Chines will imitate anything they can sell in the US and get away with it. It's not limited to just certain markets it's everything! And EBAY is not helping any by offering this crap for sale here. Guaranteed to fit my a$$! Who came up with this marketing campaign? If any of you ever watched the TV show Contraband: Seized at the Border you will see the extent of what they try to get in to the US. Fake I phones to Gucci bags and everything in between. Remember the pandemic, They where flooding the market with sub par fake N95 masks. I guess my question is if you are in the market for a intake look for the Genuine manufacture made one. I have NEVER bought a new intake for any motor i ever built. After a good glass beading can't really tell the difference. Plenty of them at swap meets and even on EBAY. Problem is finding them there with all the Chinese crap. There is search parameter at the left where you can set it for only made products made or for sale in the US that helps. This argument seems to come up a lot about off shore manufacturing. It's not where it's made it's how high the quality control is? I have some non us made tools(not Harbor Freight) and the quality is not bad. I'm sure it's not up to Snap On specs but it woks. I would suspect the same for the China made intakes for sale here. Only way to tell is compare it's fit/finish and operation the genuine Edelbrock and make your dissension. And for the 3D made parts i think someone in the US should step up the plate and start making them. It seems the software is the most difficult part of 3D printing other than the expense of the printer. I would think i few key strokes to change/modify a existing design is easier then the present casting process.

Intake and valley plate about 5kg lighter than alu

As for cheap Chinese goods, we've done that to ourselves: always looking for the cheapest stuff out there.
How many "who's cheapest" inquiries have we seen here ?
(Not saying I don't understand or suffer from a budget, but low price is a major factor for the public for most stuff. Off-shore manufacturing fills that pipeline.)

As for plastic intakes: lighter, less heat transfer, but the one on my 4.6 Mustang isn't all that light.
Granted, it's a big chunk, probably larger than a typical Mopar or SBC intake.
The car at 52,000 miles is on its 3rd intake, due to coolant leaks where the OEM unit included the coolant transfer bank to bank.
Second one (both from Ford) developed a leak where a heater hose connection is swedged/splined into the plastic.

You are absolutely correct that CEOs & shareholders share the blame as to why manufacturing fled North America. But there are plenty others who also share the blame...including consumers who decided that they need to fill their homes & lives with crap....and that the lowest possible prices were the path to that goal. Then the giant American retailers like Wal*Mart & Costco who not only convinced consumers of that, but actively bullied manufacturers to move their facilities overseas so that they could get their goods cheaper. And finally the unions who this day still insist that high school dropouts with no marketable skills are worth the type of salaries that are generally reserved for professionals.

All that said, I still avoid Chinese parts or anything whenever possible. Partly due to the tragedy that has befallen domestic manufacturing, but also because I don't want to support the the vile & reprehensible regime running that country...but I'll stop there to avoid veering this conversation off into politics and getting it killed.

I belong to an AMC forum and one of the members there put it best when this topic came up, "For years we complained that parts prices were too high. So the Chinese entered the game and parts prices dropped. This destroyed domestic manufacturing as everyone thought they were getting great deals. Unfortunately the quality dropped to the point that most parts out of the box now are junk".

And the law of unintended consequences strikes again.

I can remember back in the 1950s people complaining about buying cheap Japanese junk toys and other things for their kids

How many here are running aftermarket cranks and rods? And we aren't talking Crower high end stuff.
Doug

They have a better business plan that's much more profitable,


Step 1. sit around and wait till an American invents something,

Step 2. copy it, pay slave labor to make it

Step 3. sell it so cheap the original inventor can't make money on them and quits making them

One was developed with free markets as a guiding principal and the other with state control. The two had a dramatically different trajectory as a result. People need to stop comparing these two examples as being the same thing.

A friend of mine, and HEMI Joel's does a lot of Ford FE stuff. He has cast his own cylinder heads for FE's, and has done a bunch of intake manifolds. Since he has his own dyno, he could do a lot of testing. He was making a bunch of 3D printed intake manifolds, and testing them on his dyno mule engine. Since the 3D printed intakes are porous, he was painting the outside of the intakes with a heavy plastic type sealer. One day while making a pull, the 3D printed intake manifold blew up, sending plastic every where. Either fuel puddled, or air leaked in somewhere, but he was done testing for a while. LOL.