I am sure the
BBK and the Edelbrock TB's are good enough to last a long time. And yeah, the manufacturer of our fine cars cut as many corners as they could using sand castings for nearly everything. It's cheap. Is it better? No. Quality is quality. John Force uses billet blocks for a reason. A company develops cast parts to save money. Not to produce a quality part.
I have machined lots and lots of castings in my career. I have seen what lies under the skin. Porous material, casting irregularities, etc. The quality of the casting depends on who made the sand cast and how well they filled the mold. We get castings with .100" variance. I have cut chips on castings that were the size of a softball that cost $1400 each, and they were still not as good as the exact same parts we developed out of billet.
I also machine a LOT of billet aluminum. 6061, 7075, 2024, etc. Never once have I cut into a piece of billet and found a void in the material. Or cracks. The strength of billet without question is a lot better than a cast part. Not that this would matter much with a TB. But I have been on the development side of a lot of parts that were first prototyped out of billet, then went to castings. The billet prototypes are always far superior to the final cast pieces.
One reason for this is the fixtures required to hold a cast part for machining are always less rigid than fixtures designed to hold billet pieces. This is because billet parts are always exactly the same. So they always fit the fixture exactly the same. Cast parts vary so much the fixtures need to be adjustable. So fixtures for machining cast parts are always kind of sloppy. And the cast parts NEVER sit in the fixture exactly the same. So every single part will be different.
I have owned 6 Fox Mustangs and never once has a throttle cable came off or jam. Anyone else ever hear of this happening?