When the nostalgia craze went into overdrive a few years ago, tons of old-timers dragged their vintage multi-carb intakes off the garage shelves and tossed them onto eBayMotors.com to auction them off for what has turned into increasingly big bucks. Never mind that the reason these intakes were unbolted 30 years ago is that they tend to run like warm poo. Who cares? They look cool!
This week’s choice eBay merchandise of the cast-aluminum variety is a Mickey Thompson crossram for a Ford FE. M/T also made these for big and small Chevys as well as for Pontiacs, which is the most rare intake. Perhaps a reader can advise if a small-block Ford unit was also sold. The M/T crossrams, like the similar Edebrock X-series intakes, separated a V8 engine’s cylinders into two banks and fed them with side-by-side plenums, each with their own four-barrel carb. The right carb served the left bank of cylinders and vice-versa. Back when these intakes were new in the late ’60s Edelbrock did not figure out that the engines would run far better if there was shared plenum volume bank-to-bank. M/T did clue into this fact. The early M/T crossrams have two seperate plenums and the later ones, like the one seen our featured auction, have a tunnel linking the two. (Don’t confuse these crossrams with the later Edelbrock box rams in the STR line.)
Edelbrock also made a crossram for FE engines, and it can be used with a stock distributor. The M/T units, though, required a special distributor and longer stub shaft to work with the design of the runners. The eBay auction is very unusual in that it includes both the intake and the special distributor.
I’ll estimate that this intake and distributor sells for around $550 by the time the auction closes. Any bidders?
