PLease, Please, Please, don't let me ever get a Sandcast!! It's been a nightmare sourcing bits for my K0 and I think something like a 'Sandcast' would 'tip me overthe edge' with obsession. It seems that once you guys get one Sandcast you then become serial SC collectors
On the airbox, why don't you all get together as a group and approach LPM in the UK for him to reproduce you a few Sandcast airboxes from his prototype style tooling. I approached him a couple of years ago to produce small quanties of 'can crusher' body mouldings, which I designed for one of my customers and he was really receptive. He told me he spent his life designing and producing automotive mouldings, when he worked for Rover cars. From memory the owner is John and his son is Martyn. They were fairly large mouldings and he was busy at the time so I went with a rapid prototyped sample from 'The Product Workshop' in Rotherham UK (not too far from ChrisR) They made me silicone tooling from the original RP Chinese sample I had, which yields betwen 10 and 20 products. The latter process produces a surface finish which will even reproduce a fingerprint from the original moulding but the product is 'cast' and hence rather brittle. LPM use a form of hard polyurethane I believe.
Of course, if the part has to be original and in the fragile Styrene type plastic, then non of the above is of any use to you. Just a thought!!
Cheers
Ash