Intake Mods, do they really work?

Whats up my Mopar Maniacs? I know I have not been on here for a while, its been a very rough summer. As some of you might have noticed, I am no longer a Vendor on the "Bodies" sites. We had to drop it due to funding. Some may also know that my wife, the greatest thing to happen to this old boy, has a brain tumor. Its not life threatening, but it really affects quality of life. The meds to help with this tumor are NOT cheap, and they went way up this year. But we are getting thru it.

Anyhow, I thought a Tech page would help some of you out a bit. Intake mods, are they worth it? Some are, some not so much. Im going to look at 2 types of mods here.

First is the old tried and true "gasket match". There is a right way and a wrong way to do it. I will detail the right way another time. But in general, if your intake port is within 1/16" of your head port, you will not gain hardley anything opening it up to the same size as the heads. The biggest thing is making sure the intake port is NOT bigger than that of the head, thats bad. If its off by, say 1/8", then yes you will gain enough power to make it worth your while.

Next is a simple little mod. We have all seen it, but does it work? This mod has to do with the center divide on a dual plane intake. Does cutting it down help? I have tested this so many times, and yes it does help. You could run a small open spacer and get the same results, but not everyone has the room to do that. And its free, spacers cost money.

What I have here is a MILD 408 stroker that we tested this on this week. Here is the combo

360 30 over 4" stroke = 408
Speedmaster heads
Scat stroker kit w/hyper pistons
Lunati HR cam 231/239 .530/.550 lift, Mild
9.4 to 1 compression
Eddy AG intake
1.5 Comp rockers
FBO ignition
Nothing real fancy here, just a solid street engine.

Without any mods to the intake here is what we got:
RPM TQ/HP
3000 501/296
3500 514/341
4000 527/404
4500 515/442
5000 496/473
5300 482/487
5500 463/484
Not to bad, loads of torque and pretty good top end. It started to taper off at 5300rpm. Peak TQ was at 4000rpm 527tq and peak HP was at 5300 487hp

Now I cut the divider down about .250", lets see what happened
RPM TQ/HP
3000 506/299
3500 513/344
4000 528/404
4300 532/437
4500 529/453
5000 514/491
5200 503/500
5400 487/501
5500 479/501
5600 467/500
5700 458/499
5800 446/494

So there you have it. Same engine, same tune, same dyno, same day. Peak to peak may not seem like much, but we gained more on the top end than we expected. Almost 20HP more at 5500rpm even more at 5800 but we didnt take the first runs that high. So is it worth it? Hell YES!
And its FREE POWER!!!!! You dont have to have a fancy Mill to cut it down, you could use a 4" angle grinder to get the job done and who doesnt have one of those.