Little Story on Heat Risers and Performance Manifolds: I was chatting with Barney Navarro back about 35 years ago about performance stuff (he was pondering making his Hi-Dome heads . . . which I was pushing him to do - based on my Harley KR research). Anyway he asked me if he'd ever told me about his first manifold design??? I said no - so here goes . . . from Barney:
He had built a performance flathead using all of the stuff available from the SoCal gang - and was running an early Weiand two-pot manifold - the first one that had the high carb risers. Anyway, he had driven his hotrod somewhere out of SoCal (I can't remember where) - in Winter. It was a snowy day and he was headed back to LA and was coming up over a mountain pass and his car kept getting slower, slower and slower. Pretty soon he was barely moving and had to pull over. He couldn't imagine what the heck was happening - it was like the engine was choking to death??? So he pulled his air cleaners and the throats of his carbs were all iced up. There was just a little dime sized hole for the air to get through on both of them. Ahhhh Hahhhh! So that was it, he chipped the ice out of them and went on his way. He had to stop a few more times to clear the ice out of the carbs - but he got home.
This experience made him think about the early Eddie Meyer manifold that had the hot water plenum under the carbs - so Barney decided he'd make a performance manifold with a heat riser plenum that mounted under the carbs. The plenum got its heat from the exhaust cross-over - via a squareish port on the top of the manifold (between the carbs). The exhaust cross-over was nicknamed the "Dog Bone" - as it kind of resembled one.
The manifold was available with or without the dog-bone and if you ordered it without it, then a little finned cast plate was bolted to the heat riser port. He said most racers didn't want the dog-bone as everybody thought that "cold was good" - so if they bought his manifold with the dog-bone, they threw it away! This kind of annoyed Barney - as he knew there was a purpose for it and many hotrods would actually benefit from it.
I had an early manifold of his - but no dog-bone (had never seen one). Barney decided to recast some of the dog-bones so guys like me who wanted one could buy just the dog-bone attachment to re-equip an early manifold. When Mike at H&H bought the rights to Navarro, he acquired a few dogbones with the deal . . . probably still has some. Luckily I bought all my Navarro stuff directly from Barney - before the H&H deal was in play.
Here is a picture of just the dogbane - and a polished complete setup (not mine).
What a nice looking manifold - really unique! (I may have to resurrect mine and try it out on the 32 Cab?).
So there yah go . . . an old Barney story . . . he was quite a guy.
B&S
