Ken Block’s Ford F-150 Hoonitruck Sports Huge 3D-Printed Intake Manifold

The car itself was shown publicly for the first time a couple of months before the Gymkhana TEN’s launch as one badass machine. We mean, what else would you call a hand-hammered, military - grade aluminum body pickup truck powered by a Ford GT engine on steroids?

The 3.5-liter V6 EcoBoost fitted under the hood is so heavily mutated that it develops 914 horsepower, or in excess of 250 horsepower over the GT.

To make the entire troop generated by the engine breath properly, a purpose-built tool was needed to feed the correct amount of air from the turbochargers to the engine's cylinders.

Enter the good old intake manifold, but with a twist. Made of aluminum, the part was not built through the usual manufacturing processes, but 3D-printed. That’s because the complexity of the part required a weblike structure that couldn’t have been replicated in any other way.

For the task of making it, Ford got support from the German Digital Additive Production Institute in Germany, and together the two got to work. The end result is a 6 kg manifold (13 lbs) that took 5 days for the printer to complete and, as revealed by Ford on Wednesday, is to date the largest “3D metal-printed part for a working vehicle in automotive history.”

“I think Ford did an exceptional job. This is my favorite part of the ‘Hoonitruck’. You could not have made it any other way,” said Block about the truck he had built as a tribute to his father’s F-150.

You can have a look at what Ford Performance had to go through to develop this one part in the video below.