On the manifolds, I approached a small local company that did sand casting with my design of the mainifolds to mate my Webers to the Olds 215 and they looked at my drawings and said "Yes, we can do that. It will cost about $4000." I responded with "Well, that ends that". The guy took me into the back of his building and showed me hundreds of wooden and metal plates hanging form the ceiling. He picked one that was a small manifold for a small diesel engine and said "You make the wood forms and a plaster of paris mold of the core and I will cast them for $50. each" So, in my spare time (at times) I made the wood outer forms and a plaster of paris inner die mold. I didn't spend a lot of time on them but only worked on them every few months so it took me a year and a half to get most of it finished. I didn't remember what he told me as to how to place each (cut in half) piece on a board so I took my box of wooden pieces and the home made box of plaster to him asking what was my next step and he said he could do that. However, he said operating cost has went up since I was there back in 19xx. Ha! So he said it would be $100. each now which was still OK with me so I had him make 3 sets. That's 6 pieces as I made one bank manifolds. That is still only $200 for a complete manifold. But these were rough castings so they still needed to be machined etc. I have a good friend here who use to be Micky Thompson's machinist and he had an end mill and surface grinder so I made a 45 deg. mount and had him surface both faces. I then made a plate with the pattern of the Webers and fastened it to the manifold and tried to use a die grinder but that was rough so I tried a router and that worked great. For the head/port side I made a pattern for that and with bluing I made a scribe line and used the die grinder on that end and then use the die grinder to transission the insides. I then used a beadblaster to make it all look good and clear coated the outside and it looked factory made.

I can write this up with pictures if you think it is worth doing and send it to you. My whole car has been like this as I looked at this project as my hobby. Not the car but the building of the car. Everyone who has seen the car so far has said they thought I have gone crazy. But I looked at this as an ongoing project and I am not sure I want the car as much as want the building of the car. I have also designed a compressed air starting system for it. Not a diesel truck air starter but direct injected air to spin the engine like the WWII bombers used to spin those 18 cyl. radials.

look at my website under "Project" and "Alcohol" to see some of my projects. Some completed and some still in the works. http://mg-tri-jag.net

Yes, the Rutan plane is composit of fiberglass over foam construction all the way through. Super strong and fast. I have very little experience with fiberglass except for a few hours training seminar at Oshkosh and I made my own fairing for a motorcycle I raced at Daytona in a USMC 250cc race in 1960. I lead the 250 class for 3 laps when I fell off. Big Ouch!!.

I will dig to see if I can find the files for the pictures that went with the "Direct Injection" story. I have them somewhere as I can't throw anything away. ( a disorder of some kind ha!).

Here are some of the pictures as attachments. I found them on an older PC I have, but could not find the original camera picture. If these are not good enough I can quickly take new pictures in a .jpg format, let me know.