Pics of Summit "Stage x" intake... Poor quality!

A customer brought in a Summit Stage 3 intake to show me the other day.
Here are a few pictures of it. This is essentially an Edelbrock Air-Gap RPM.
Trust me, the pictures do not do justice to the poor quality control, bad casting and sub-par machining.

Summit1.jpg shows the uneven shape of the ports.
No two ports were the same size or shape.
The very edge of each port had been hit with a tootsie roll leaving very uneven edges to the ports.
The front and rear gasket surfaces were as cast.
There was an attempt to machine the gasket surface
but the cutter only contacted the surface for part of each pad leaving low spots.

Summit2.jpg highlights heavy casting flash at the parting seams,
marginal cleanup with a grinder to smooth the part.
Over all ugly and no attention to detail. Look into the Plenum and try not to cringe.

Summit3.jpg shows the large web of aluminum between the front two ports
as well as the uneven surfaces where the intake bolts go.
With this much variation in the surface, it will be hard to get uniform bolt torque.

Summit4.jpg shows lots more of the same.

I bolted this intake down to a fresh motor that was destined to get an Air-Gap manifold.
I had difficulty hand threading the intake bolts with this intake but no problems with the Edelbrock.
I am sure that the front and rear gaskets would not have sealed.
It would have required using a bead of silicon rather than gaskets.
Gasket matching the intake would have required a lot of work as the
ports were nowhere near uniform or even correctly centered.
Some ports were all the way to the left of the gasket opening while another port on the same side
was all the way to the right of the gasket opening.

From an appearance point of view, I would be embarrassed to put this on a customers car.
The owner of this one offered it to me for my beater Maverick but I just couldn't quite bring myself to accept it.

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