When you’ve been building Mopar wedges as long as Hughes Engines has, you pick up a whole bunch of handy tricks of the trade. It seems like they’ve got special techniques for everything from nuisance oil drips to crippling intake manifold leaks.
The latter is massively important for performance and, as with anything, there is groundwork to be laid and myths to be dispelled. The short version is that gasket surface alignment is key, but Mr. Hughes has also laid out the specific steps in a handy instruction sheet.
Here’s a taste of the secret sauce, then we’ll dive into the details in a second installment:
Intake manifold sealing to the heads can be a major tuning problem and is fairly common. Many times, it is misdiagnosed as bad valve stem seals because oil puddles up behind the intake valves. About 75% of the engines we build need the intake manifold corrected. This is how we do it.
The block, heads and intakes have angles on them, and each one of these angles has a +/- tolerance. If these tolerances all “stack-up” in the correct way, the angle of the intake gasket surface and the intake side of the head will match up properly and seal perfectly.
The problem is that if the angles don’t stack-up properly, and that is the more likely case, you will draw oil up from the valley into the intake ports or draw-in air causing all sorts of tuning problems, on any engine.
