Every time I think about thinning my collections of magazines, I seem to find a gem that needs to be shared. Here's one concerning Man-A-Fre intakes set-ups. I know most are familiar with the 4 carb versions, but has anyone seen or used any of the other ones?! From the May '66 issue of Popular Hot Rodding, Enjoy.
Ol Harold made some changes to the two barrel carburetors too. He cut out the divider between the two ventures, to make the upper a single oval opening. I thought, to give it a try, just for the hell of it. I cut the center piece out, did some reshaping. Some JB weld to reshape the ventury opening, much like the Holley three barrel carburetor. Then to smooth the airflow through the base, you ground the base into a "V" where the air enters the throttle bores. No flat s left on the throttle bore base for the air to bounce off of. A friend put the one that I did on his 65, 283 El Camino. While I do not recall the specifics, his El Camino went a little quicker and faster at the original Irwindale Raceway, than with the factory two barrel carburetor. Interesting fact too, the open throttle sound was much different than a stock carburetor also. I then lent it to a friend that put it on his Hot Rod, Corvair. That whole thing was a constant experiment. I never actually ran it on anything of my own. I just did it as an exercise, experiment. And yeah, I ran a normal, four carb. Man-a-Fre on my 56 Chevy for 5 or 6 (more?) years. Both on a 327 and a 350 engine. Mike
Isn't it funny how you can go through them again and again and see something of particular interest each time. Sometimes they are very timely, I was going through a stack a few weeks ago and found articles on how Royal Pontiac and Geraghty Automotive power tuned the GTO 3x2 set-up back then. Just as I was rebuilding one.
I went and found that issue of PHR and read the article. while they showed a few different manifolds in the pictures, all they talked about was the 4x2 setups. Maybe the others were prototypes that never made it to production? who knows. I have a man a fre on my corvette and it runs great and even gets pretty respectable mileage at 18 mpg .....
Sounds sweet…any specific carbs you need to run on those intakes? Seems like someone on the HAMB has a American Graffiti coupe and had trouble getting it set-up correctly. Thinking he needed to run some specific truck two- barrel carbs?
…so if one wanted to run that intake, would they need to run 58 chev carbs? Or is it the intake was designed for those type of carbs?
There are a number of carbs that will work, but the throttle arm on the 58 chev carbs are the proper length to work with their linkage. most other carbs that were modified back in the day had the throttle arms cut off and a man a fre modified arm welded on so that the throttle linkage would work
on my V8 Corvair, I went through this Offenhauser manifold with the carbs matched completely. We could get top end and ugly at low speeds or low speeds but no top end. We screwed with this for almost 6 months before I removed and sold it.....and replaced it with a sniper...........so sweet I still think this is the best looking induction system
Paul, Yes, I think all BBC Man-A-Fre intakes were made for big GC's (but I don't know, for sure). My intake was modified (adaptors made) to run the smaller carbs.
The Jalopy Journal
