Ya know,What someone needs to do is design a plastic/nylon intake that is similar to the ones on the LS engine that is light weight, does not carry water, seals out the oil valley, and flows about 1200cfm, and bolts on to the gen 1 engines.

The problem with the TPI is that it is too maintenance challenged and was designed for a 305 ci engine.
The intake is too modular.
1. It removes the water from the engine.
2. It holds the fuel system, injectors, fuel rail, regulator,
3. It holds the distributor in place.
4. it holds the EGR and passages
5. The manifold has 4 major parts
6. The fasteners to the assembly are hard to get to
7. The wiring for the manifold is cumbersome
8. The fuel lines are difficult to access
9. The manifold is prone to vacuum leaks
10. The manifold is not easily adaptable.

The Lt engines are not all that much better. The optispark is the trade off for an easier maintained intake.

I know, the Gen 1 is dead, and the current engineering push is to the LS engine.
But there are about 50 million Gen 1 engines out there with about 2 million of them in performance oriented vehicles, and maybe 500,000 of the owners might buy a better manifold.
Wonder if you could make money on that?

 

AFR started making one for carbs
http://www.airflowresearch.com/index.php?cPath=79_81

I don't think you'll find enough market to cover the R&D for a TPI/LT1 intake, but that's just IMHO..

You could probably adapt the AFR intake for a 4V throttle body if you can manage to get injector bungs incorporated into the composite ?

 

I know I sure would like to see something like that, I have had it with the TPI, mine is running great but it just isn't letting my 383 strut it's stuff. I have some posts going right now about alternate intakes and plan on starting one soon to see if anyone may be interested in my complete setup.

 

Check this out. 1989GTATransAm already has a monster TPI that puts down 420hp to the rear wheels and passes smog, yet he still ain't happy.

http://www.thirdgen.org/techboard/tp...ruction-4.html

He was looking at composite material at first but I believe it was just too difficult.

 

Looked into this a number of yrs ago and it is super super expensive to get going. Noone will do a run of less than 1000 to start with and if you really want to capture a market youd want the EGR+passages all in place.
Patent, CARB cert BIG BUX!

Noone would touch that for fear of heat related failures.

Plus imo to make it profitable dont think anyone woulda paid the asking price. Big ri$k to the mfr plus a few mos later some co would have them cast in China then you go under