Does anyone know if they made a split manifold for a straight 8 Packard? My buddy is wanting to change the exhaust on his '49 Packard to give it more of a tone. We been trying to do some research about putting Dual Exhaust on the car and been coming up with very little info. If they didn't make a split manifold what would your thoughts be on doing a custom header and running duals back? Anyone have any pictures of split manifolds, or custom headers on a Packard straight 8? As always pictures would be great, even need pics of other exhaust setup on these cars or your ideas. Alot of you guys been in the car hobby alot longer then us so any suggestions are very much appreciated. Thanks
I never gave much thought to splitting a Packard exh manifold. The tubing is quite large by the normal automotive standards of the time and it's all mandrel bent turns. Even the muffler, although large and pleasant sounding, has enough flow capacity so as not to have too much effect on performance. I'll have to do some digging to find it, but the exhaust manifold design, and the intake as well, were finalized by Col. Jesse Vincent. They kept his concepts of "hurricane force velocities" through most of the straight 8 production even into the 356/359 variants. I'm not so sure that splitting the manifold would actually increase power. It may have the opposite effect, although I have seen custom tubular headers designed with the firing order in mind.
Thats very interesting information, I hadn't really thought of it from a Performance stand point. We were just sitting around talking the other night and he mentioned wanting to put dual exhaust, first thing I thought of was the old split manifolds, but never seeing one on a Packard, I didn't know if they even exist. The car is basically restored, it was redone back in the 80s, seen very little road time and then was parked in a barn where it sat for almost 20 years before my buddy bought it. For the most part he has done very little change it, but he just been looking for some simple deals to kinda give it that 50's hot rod feel, been talking about lowering it and maybe a simple hubcap change. Otherwise just adding factory accessory items and if we could find factory performance parts, but they seem to be very scarce if they even made any.
Sounded good on the car I got them from but there were mufflers. I plan to run straight pipes so there should be some decent cackle to them.
do you happen to have any pictures of how the exhaust was ran under the car, the problem i see is they run the exhaust through the x-frame then to the back and there isn`t alot of room
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