I got where I wanted to be for the night. It's too pretty for Black Jack's engine bay. Maybe I should take it back out!!!
Took a little longer than I wanted, but I stopped to talk to TMOSS. Got to play with my new toy that I specifically got for this project. I wanted to see inside of the ports in order to align from top to bottom & had a .060 gasket (1250), and a .065 gasket (1250S3) on hand to adjust as needed.
Here's what I saw after the final torque down:
I thought top to bottom port alignment looked pretty good, and decided to stick with the standard Felpro-1250. But, left to right wasn't perfect. After talking to TMOSS, I think what's going on here is that the GT40X heads have ports that aren't spot on with a 1250 gasket, whereas the intake is pretty much perfect. The interesting thing to me, anal retentive as I am, is that even tweaking the intake forward or backwards in the bolt holes a bit can't improve from here, as the offset is the opposite direction on each side.
For what it's worth, I threw on my original intake back on to look at the alignment, which I still have because I bought one from the marketplace that Matt (TMOSS's son) ported. The original intake has no offset from the heads, but on the other hand, I'm positive that's because the ports on the original unported intake are smaller than the gasket & GT40X head. So, I slapped it together and will run it. Looking forward to testing it out.
All the silicone, including the T-stat housing is on and setting overnight. I'm ready for bed, and am looking forward to finishing up, tomorrow.