The Pantera manifold is designed for the Pantera throttle cable. The carburetors face out so that the throttle plates of the carbs give line of sight to the intake valve.
Both are correct for a racing manifold.
The linkage is really very simple for it. It works off of the center pilon and a short arm connects to the right side carbs under, and the left side carbs over with a longer arm and mount to the wheel on the center tower with an extended coupling nut. It's about 1-1/2" long (tall).
I don't know if Detomaso added the tower to the original Holman-Moody design or H-M designed it for the Pantera that way? I've never seen the original H-M version. Only the DT version, of which I'll bet there were maybe 50 made. They are VERY rare.
Since Weber carb shafts twist like there is no tomorrow, you can't load the carbs from anyplace but in the middle.
The bearings in the carbs neither will tolerate being end loaded without almost .100" of deflection. That means the left and right side would never open together as they should if you end load them.
You can eliminate the center mount and go to a Mustang side mount system simultaneously with reversing one side of the carbs.
This is something Inglese recommends to simplify the linkage issues.
Reversing the carbs on one side will loose you 30 horsepower by putting those throttle plates on the wrong side of the ports.
If you think Halls manifold is flimsy, you ain't seen nothin' till you see the Detomaso version.
I've owned two Hall manifolds and had zero issues with the production qualities. One with the big 4v port and one small port (A3).
The 4v version was on my Mustang and it made sense to convert it to the side mount linkage like the Cobras used and face the carbs the same way. It made life much simpler but even that likage design had an issue with twisting at wide open throttle. After running wot, the car would not return to 800rpm idle. The linkage had twisted.
The Pantera center pivot has much less issue with that. You will also discover that there really is no perfect linkage design for this set up.
The nicest one I saw was the 427 design with the carbs mounting 90 degrees from what we all have now since that made a simple pull design of the carbs so easy. The reason it was never run extensively has got to be the throttle tip in location and the line of sight to the valve location. After all. All of them were intended for maximum performance at racing levels. Not street-ability.
There is enough material in the flanges of the manifold to bore them out considerably and any manifold I've EVER used needed some type of gasket cleanup. That's no big deal at all.
There isn't quite enough material to bore them out to 58mm but certainly the 51.5mm Berg modified IDA's will fit.
Nice setup Kid. I like the low glitz them.
