FYI: New Redesigned Intake Manifolds are shipping from JHM (Mine just arrived)

A6 All/ S6 All
#61

More importantly, lets get back on top of the issue at hand. Flaps breaking off.
Looking at the pics provided, it seems to me, one can still simply remove all the flaps, drill out the center plastic section and press/epoxy these onto a keyed steel shaft.
CV mentioned most of the failures he has seen are right at the flap to pin connection, similar to a rod pin to counter weight area. those are high stress locations, and with crap and heat cycling, it will cause a force upon this location, eventually leading to a failure.

Without having a spare manifold infront of me, is there any reason as to why one could not pass a straight rod through the fulcrum point of the flaps?

#62

Yeah that’s my plan A; to design a kit with shafts, bearing blocks and a drillling jig and new means to attach the bearing blocks.
Plan B would be a full CNC kit with new bearing blocks again. But much more costly

#63

Great idea to get back on track.

I think in theory that is a great idea. I know JHM is working on something kinda similar but I dont know where they are at in testing and as I said before.

Here are where the issues I see come up. The counter weight looking part of the assembly appears to be part of a stop for the range of motion of the flaps. This could also be taking lots of abuse and also causing it to break… but back on point. Even if you were to come up with a rod you would still need to run it the length of the blocks and you would need to assemble it all together in one piece. Not only that but the TQ flaps are all connected on one motor and linked together so one motor is running the TQ flaps on both sides and they are tied together with a connecting rod.

I did stumble on some possible good news. There is a local guy wants help with a carbon clean. He has an S5. I put a bore scope into this intake and it looks like it could possibly be exactly like ours. The flap system looks like it might be all the same. I will know more this weekend when I pull the intake off. Ill try to see if he will let me seperate his intake to inspect it.

If the S5 and S6 intakes are the same with the same flaps it would be interesting to see if there are any obvious visual changes. I did some searching and havent found any S5 guys having any issues with there intakes. But that can be because maybe none of them know they have an issue or because there are just no issues.

Still this might be a good point to help break down some information.

#64

Great post Justin.

I remember when I was working on my former 08 s6 (possibly even with jimmy from AR), we were fairly certain that the intake manifold between the s6 and s5 were identical. This was about 3-4 years ago. Now at that time I had a one owner s6 with only 50k and I replaced the manifold, it was not completely broken but just one of the flaps was and the dealer happened to have it in stock and the warranty covered it so they did. In reality, a place like JHM could possibly repair a flap like that, and not just replace the entire thing.

Fast forward to today. The intake manifold itself performs very well and is not overly junk or weak even the originals, although from what I hear and see the newer revisions are slightly better. What happens is if you buy a car that has 60-80k+ miles with no real maint. And remember first and second owners and even the dealers had no idea what “real” maint was on these cars other than just oil changes and possibly spark plugs, then yes it is very possible that you could be hit with a broken manifold, either a component is bad or the whole item needs to be replaced.

I’ll quickly follow that up with saying I bet there are people out there that have partially broken IMs, but the cars still perform decent so they really think nothing of it.

Now if you replace that manifold and stay on top of maint including carbon cleaning say ever 30-60k (depending how anal you are) to keep the “gunk” out, and do things to keep the temps down like IM spacers, I will be very shocked if your entire IM shits the bed and you will need another brand new one in the foreseeable future. I could be wrong and people don’t tend to keep these cars forever, but from those I’ve spoken to both mechanics and owners after a IM replacement I have not heard of someone breaking another one shortly after.

Hope that helps.

Now with all that said, I would still be interested in an aftermarket Manifold say from JHM that actually improves performance. If the design itself is also more robust that’s another obvious beit, but my point is the stock unit isn’t exactly total Junk and does do it’s job fairly well.

#65

I just wanna toss two cents in on the failure… on the V10s it’s adding one more flap on the end; could it be that just the addition on one more flap without reinforcing the rest could be attributing to the failure?

After taking my manifold apart on the weekend and having multiple broken flaps I feel like the breakage is from the plastic going brittle. I removed all of the flaps and the posts too, there was far too much damage to salvage any thing. I like the idea of putting something like a long stainless steel rod, and new flaps on bearings or the like, but that seems super far fetched and expensive.

I posted in the other forum post about the broken intake, I’m curious to just removing the center section, but worried that an open plentum like that would cause more problems than keeping it intact with the flaps removed. I’ll post some pics of my intake later tonight, but some of the posts on the middle runner section also broke, I’m not even certain how there would be stress there inside the intake enough to break the magnesium.

JHM just needs to make a manifold/supercharger to add to the car ;D

#66

I’m also curious if anyone has thought of adding water/meth injection simply as a cleaning/carbon reducing agent?

I don’t know if I’d run it all the time or just have it on a toggle switch so I can do some carbon cleaning while stretching her legs.

#67

That’s pretty huge news, great find! I don’t have any pictures unfortunately.

I wonder if he can make them more durable than the factory ones. Any idea what he charges for the lambo ones? I didn’t see a price on the website. Would be awesome if we could get an affordable fix for this otherwise very expensive and common problem!

Edit: I just realized how old the post was that I replied to, oops! I’ll re-read this thread…

#68

That sounds promising! Curious on the befits and failure rates on the other cars!

#69

Same… reading through all the intake posts now lol. Sorry for all of those who’ve already pointed out some short comings, ect of modifying the intake. I may just message that guy with the lambo flaps, I can just mail him my broken ones he can keep them.