How to destroy a piece of 348-409 Mickey Thompson Power Ram history one part at a time because you can.

Tom Kochtanek

Well Known Member
Supporting Member 12
Paul:

Good question! I haven't thought through the air cleaner/hood clearance issue as yet. I will rely on James to come up with a design :).

I do have one of those "Ford truck" scoops but I suspect we're gonna cut a bigger hole than that.

Right now I've got the front clip off and set to the side. I'm still putting the front suspension together and adding a set of disk brakes from Mike (thanks Mike, I might just need a second set for another build!).

Cheers! TomK
 

Barry Taylor

Well Known Member
Supporting Member 3
Tom, i never put them on anything except the shelf. The last one i had i sold for mo motor money. Ronnie never got excited about it so i sold it. I think there something there. To me it’s just an odd shaped tunnel ram.
 

MRHP

 
Supporting Member 1
I had looked into getting one, but hood clearance issues slowed my roll. I had considered lowering the motor mounts and notching the front crossmember for clearance. Lots of extra work for an intake manifold. I wanted no scoop, and adequate air cleaners for my power level. You could also do a mild body lift for additional clearance. In the long run, the edelbrock intake bolted on with no other mods. I took the easy way out.
 

1964SuperStocker

Well Known Member
Supporting Member 3
I can’t help but thinking there had to have been more than 50 of these made. Ive owned two in my days here on earth. I don’t think they would have even gotten there r&d and tooling money back with those numbers. :dunno
I found the small port M/T Power Ram for sale on ebay about 2 years ago. Probably made a big mistake not buying it. Its now on another street car. I guess that is where M/T Power Ram's go to die. The street.
 

63 dream'n

Well Seasoned Member
Supporting Member 4
I found the small port M/T Power Ram for sale on ebay about 2 years ago. Probably made a big mistake not buying it. Its now on another street car. I guess that is where M/T Power Ram's go to die. The street.

When cars were cruising the strip they wanted all the high-performance stuff you could put Under the hood of your hot rod...... hundreds of thousands of people have built motors that were too much for the street ......and ended up being disappointed because of the performance......And the unreliability.....It’s not shocking and it’s definitely nothing new.....:dunno anytime someone builds a street/strip car that’s gonna be the case .......It’s the hot rodders oxymoron
 

425/409ER

Well Known Member
I've kinda got mixed emotions on this. I probably would never do that because I generally like to preserve stuff, especially if it works OK as-is. But sometimes, I can't help myself and I feel like tinkering with something just because I think it needs improvement. Now, I don't know whose intake that is, but it does belong to them, for better or worse. So let them have at it. Maybe it's just a learning experience. Maybe it's a mistake. On the other hand, I doubt that Mickey T was very skilled at manifold design, either, nothing designed in that era looks too good today. Maybe it will make an improvement?

As far as the need for a CNC machine to make it all uniform, I'm not so sure about that, either. Many great hot rod parts were built, both by companies and by individuals, using common sense and the equipment they had on hand, long before anyone could spell CNC. And I would be willing to bet that there are some really good head porters out there (I know a couple from my own experience) that hand-finish everything. After all, our sport doesn't survive in fully-equipped machine shops, more likely in whatever garages and spaces we have available.
View attachment 90031 View attachment 90032

So here are a couple of pics of an intake I just pulled off my Nova. It's not really either a single plane, nor is it a dual-plane like most 180* dual-planes, maybe it's kind of a cross-ram. Did it work? Ran fine when things got warmed up. I won't modify it because somebody might want it as-is, and the designer forgot more about manifolds than I will ever know. Maybe it doesn't measure up to today's performance levels? I have no idea, mine never saw a dyno or a track. It did get a lot of comments. Sometimes it's hard to say what might work and what might not. A lot of times, someone else can show you a better or cleaner way to accomplish whatever it is you are trying to do.

My point is that most of the people on this site can do some amazing things based on common sense, practical experience and basic tools. That is the basis of our "sport" much as it was back in the 50s and 60s. I also know for every successful "hack", as they are called today, there are probably 5 or 6 failures we don't know about!

I got one of those hanging on my garage wall It's Tork-link intake, they are cool looking. Had 3 of them at one time and the 2 guys that bought the other ones paid big bucks to get'em as I didn't want to sell. It's a cool liking intake just like the Smokey Ram.
 

chevytaylor

Well Known Member
Supporting Member 2
Well, I ran one for about 10 years N/A on the street/strip with absolutely no issues at all. Drove the car to and from track, 2012/13 drove the car over 5000km's and won the National Super Street title. Ran great with 2 x properly tuned 600 Edy's. The engine was a pump gas 10.25-1 , 476 inch 09 and ran 11.00's @ 120+mph in a 3900lb brick. My ANDRA tech cut off was 11.00 seconds at the time so worked perfectly. Can understand that if you want to go deep into the tens or nines or make 1000hp then it's probably limited. I think it's easy to blame lack of performance of something due to lack of knowledge. If some key board warrior says it don't work, It's not always the case.:doh
 
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Don Jacks

Well Seasoned Member
Supporting Member 3
And you even ran Nitros on it and it worked just great as I remember.I'm thinking that most of this reversion is from poor cam choices.It hasn't been that long ago that people were chasing reversion on about everything even tunnel rams.Modern cam designs along with exhaust improvements have pretty much eliminated it
 

chevytaylor

Well Known Member
Supporting Member 2
Same engine went 10.39 @ 127mph with 100 shot of gas Don, that was heavier @ 4000lb race weight with addition of cage. Actually closer to 4200lb with nitrous stuff. No one is going to tell me the M/T manifold don't work. Yeah, it could be better, but this thing was made 50years ago, give it a break FFS. Who else apart from Russ (who I have great respect for) has actually seriously street driven and raced this manifold?:rub
 
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