Yah if you consider all the other aluminum engine, rubber timing belt cars out there
that you have to pull the engine to change a belt, or a head to change a blown gasket,
I guess our 3800 weak intake is not too bad after all.
Its right on top, remove the fuel rail and away you go.
My theory is that GM made too good of an engine (worlds ten best) cast iron block and heads, steel timing chain and was loosing money on service.
When was the last time you heard someone changing their timing chain on the board?
It must be rare.

i almost had to do the same thing on my girlfriends grand prix luckly is wasnt that and we still havent found the problem but she said her gas pedel was sticking so we cleaned her trottle body and it looked worse then your is was nasty it took my dad forever to clean it out luckly my dads neighbor is a gm mechanic at a local pontiac dealership so we had him look that the intake for us and it turned out to be fine. but wow what a mess u had. hopefully its the only time u have to do that.

It'* good that your intake isn't leaking, but if it ever does at least they made it easy to change. Those throttles are no fun to clean. A while back my Blazer'* was dirty enough where it was sticking. I looks like this aftermarket intake will last much longer, with the thicker plastic around the EGR tube. My last 2 each lasted 100,000 miles.

Is there a removeable plate at the base of the intake?
I bought a spare and it doesn't seem to have the small pipes sticking
down from the bottom or a gasket as seen in the pics?

The orange gasket on the base of the intake is removable and it clips on. The Dorman intake already had the gasket attached. It soes not come with the small metal EGR pipe, so I just reused the old one.

So the orange gasket has the two small plastic pipes attached also?

Yes, the small pipes are part of the gasket. I think they are only there to help in aligning the gasket to the lower intake, since the upper intake bolts go through those pipes.

Thanks,
One more quick question.
My drivability book only covers removal of the fuel rail and throttle and said
the assembly torque is 7 ft lb for these nuts.
Are the plastic intake bolt torques the same? 7 ft lb?

Chilton says 89 inch-lbs (10 Nm) for the upper-to-lower manifold retaining bolts for a 96 VIN K. So yeah, about 7.5 ft-lbs.

-b

Now I'm confused?
Is the chilton book wrong?
Just found this forum tech post that said 11 ft lbs?
Please check it out.
http://www.bonnevilleclub.com/techinfo/?article=73