I have been hearing horror stories about IC end tanks blowing up made from 16g Al, How much of this is due to bad welding and how much of this is from the material just being too thin?

I need to make some intake manifolds with bends in them but the only mandrel Al u bends I can find are 16g and I don't think I'll find anything thicker. Should I just make them from SS instead?

 

I cant find any thick mandrel bends or elbows either. I dont know if 16 gauge will be enough for a plenum or not. I would kinda be scared of it cracking over time. I think most of the guys on here that have made intake manifolds are using 1/8" material and just forming it ,but I dont know. Good thread im interested to here some stuff on this as well

 

.090 works fine and I would consider as a min when it comes to the flat areas of the tanks. Depending on what radius bend your going to use and ultimately what you boost level will be you need to be careful as a 1/16 (.063) wall bend could be as thin as .025 around the outside of the radius from the bending process although I have yet to have a failure of a tube. If you have end tanks or plenums with allot of flat surface the boost will try to balloon them and the constant flexing will cause failure. Don't forget a manifold goes from vacuum to boost (for a boosted application)plus pulses from the valves opening and closing.
Same reason you won't see a squared off tank on an air compressor.

You can get bends in different wall thicknesses from a place called woolf aircraft
http://www.woolfaircraft.com/prebent.php


Modified by KFMRC at 11:29 AM 1/11/2007


Modified by KFMRC at 11:30 AM 1/11/2007

 

I've often wondered why you turbo guys don't fab cooling fins onto your
end tanks. If you run them right across, it will also greatly strengthen the tank, and add a small amount of cooling to the equation.
It would look fine too. Just taper the flat bar on the ends, small stitches,
staggered-intermittent.
It would be considerably stronger than slightly thicker flat sections.
I'm an n/a guy, otherwise I would have tried already.

Just my .02

 

i use 1/8" thick 6061 for every part of the plenum except the t-body mounting plate which can vary depending on what i have availible between 5/16" to 7/16". theres got to be some place out there that sells cast al3 elbows (not cheap quality either)