Problem with intake?

A buddy has a used Edelbrock Performer intake on his 302 with E7 heads. The problem is that there is a small port (I think it might be the heat riser or EGR related?) in the middle of the head that is slightly uncovered. The car runs fine, but we were looking at a spare set of E7s I have laying around and I could see the valve stem in there.

Anyone have an idea what is wrong? Are some Performers incompatible with E7s? Doesn't seem plausible to me. At first I thought maybe the intake had been cut by someone in the past, but there's another guy on a local internet forum that posted about the same problem.

Is there any way he can get away with using this intake without an extreme solution like welding material onto it?

The hole is uncovered. You can see between 1/8 and 1/4 inch of the top of the port over the top of the intake.

Well my friend talked to Edelbrock and they said it's a blind hole in the head that doesn't go anywhere.

He is fairly certain he has E7s on the car, but we looked at a set of E7s I have in my garage and the motor in my 70 vert - none of the E7s have this hole in them. I do have the 302 from my '83 GT Mustang and it has the same blind ports. They are uncovered from the factory with the factory intake on it. I have no idea why Ford would make this, but the bottom line seems to be that there is no problem.

I thought I should post this in case anyone else has this issue in the future.

ratio411 said:

That was pretty clear when you said the car runs great and didn't mention anything about exhaust pouring out of the hole. It would have been one hellva exhaust leak!
If it ain't broke, there's nothing to fix.

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Thanks, you're right. We wanted to be absolutely sure it wasn't an intake or exhaust port, but a vacuum leak from the intake would have produced very poor drivability as well.