The Munster Koach from the TV series has a V8 engine with 10 carburettors.
The engine was a 289 cubic-inch Ford V8 originally configured for installation in a 1964+1⁄2 Mustang.[1] It was built with Jahns high compression pistons, 10 chrome plated Carter WA-1 carburetors…
I can understand one carb for each cylinder, but how are the two extra ones incorporated?
Is this based on actual specs or just what’s visible? Are the carbs and pipes on top of the engine even functional?
ETA: I think the actual pipes are behind the front wheels and there are only 8; 4 on each side.
Is it necessary or even markedly beneficial for each cylinder to have a carburetor of its own? So, I have two on the exact same car and you have ten. The difference?
I notice you can see a single air cleaner in the middle, some googling confirmed.
http://www.munsterkoach.com/dean1.htm
7.) 10 carburetors for 8 cylinders? Isn’t that over kill?
The carbs on both cars were phony. There was a 4 barreled carb under the box.
ETA, I’ve looked at the picture multiple times and only just now noticed it has coffin handles on the side of the engine.
Those are the exhaust pipes. I’m talking about the carbs (intake) on top, with the ‘air horn’ pipes.
Aha! Thanks for that. I didn’t see it.
Just for show, kind of like wings or stick-on air scoops today.
Decorative Hood: The air flow hood is mainly used for self-adhesive and decorative hood vents; Please note that the air flow intake scoop is just for decorative, no substantial heat dissipation function
Easy to Install: This car decorative hood scoop is easy to install, just by sticking it on your car hood without complicated operations
The person with ten carbs gets to delve into the persnickety aspects of configuration of each one of those damned devices, carefully turning the setting screws for air-fuel mixture, taking out the baffle plates and looking for warpage, aligning jets, etc etc etc, the composite success of which requires sacrificing two virgins and a set of gaskets at a crossroads at midnight on a moonless night — all of which might conceivably make theoretical (if not real-life) sense if each individual cylinder were somehow getting a personally calibrated A/F mixture custom delivered to it on each intake stroke, but with ten of the damn things feeding eight cylinders we have to assume it’s all getting mixed into an undifferentiated aerosol within an intake manifold before being sucked into the combustion chambers.
Whereas the person with just two gets to spend 80% more time driving and 80% less time futzing with cantankerous carburetors.
(I do not miss those things).
Thought so!! 
Along similar lines, the blower on the Monkeemobile is also just for show. It reportedly was originally functional but all that power made people afraid to drive the car except in a straight line.
Too bad that great custom cars are hardly ever used anymore.
If they all feed into an intake manifold, it probably doesn’t really matter how many carbs vs. cylinders there are, just how much air and gas are coming into the engine.
The V-8 with 4 cross-ram Webers is my favorite setup for looks. And of course, there was the Tri-Power - 3 dual carbs. At one time hot rodders made up a manifold for 5 dual carbs on a V-8. With tall velocity stacks it would have looked similar to the Munster’s engine and they all flowed.
I once had the opportunity to swap out the four barrel intake manifold of my 389 Pontiac for a stock tri-power — three two-barrel carbs. I thought about it, because I was 20 years old and it does kind of sound awesome, but in the long run I didn’t.
a) The three deuce design was for three Rochester carbs. I hated the Rochester design, with their narrow throats and crowded interiors and (in my limited experience) annoyingly unresponsiveness to attempts to fine-tune them.
b) In addition to the futziness of each carb needing to be attended to with loving care, the linkages between them, designed to run the middle carb as a primary and kick in the front and back ones as synchronized secondaries, would also have required their share of upkeep and tweaking.
c) In contrast to the Rochesters, I actively liked Carter’s AFB (aluminum four barrel) design and I had an 1800 cfm upgrade on the 4-bbl manifold already. I figured there was a decent chance that I’d go to all that trouble and find I’d done a stepdown in real performance and responsiveness.
Potentially it can be tuned so that each cylinder gets the same fuel-air mix in each cylinder. When a single carb feeds multiple cylinders the mix will not be quite equal for each cylinder causing some loss of power and more vibration. The trouble is the difficulty in tuning all those carbs. Fuel injection has made this a problem of the past.
Yes, you can tune each cylinder for better flow. Many modern cars due exactly that with fuel injection and individual runners. It’s possible to tune it so their is a pulse wave that brings in more air than the cylinder draws naturally.
BMW’s 2-cylinder “boxer” motorcycle engine, now about a hundred years old, historically featured a carb for each cylinder. Then in the '90s, they went with electronic port fuel injection - but still had a separate cable-actuated throttle body for each cylinder. Every 6000 miles you were supposed to use a differential vacuum gauge to ensure that both sides were getting matched air flow at idle and also at light throttle settings. Each cylinder got identical fuel injection quantities, so if you weren’t also feeding them identical air quantities, they ran a little rough.
Some time in the past decade or so they switched over to a single electronically-controlled throttle, with the branching to the two cylinder happening downstream of it. Hallelujah, no more throttle balancing maintenance work! To the extent that there’s any air flow discrepancy between one cylinder and the other, each has its own O2 sensor so the ECU can tweak the fuel injection for each cylinder independently.
I had triple Weber carbs on my 240-Z. In that application, their primary function seemed to be creating lots of work for me keeping the carbs tuned properly so the engine didn’t run rough.
The 10 “carbs” are shown to be mounted to and supposedly feed into the valve covers. A convenient way to stick on some showy stuff, but not functional. As mentioned, there is an air cleaner between the rows of fake single barrel carbs. Probably sitting atop two 4 barrel carbs.
As the last line in mixdenny’s link concludes,
Of course, here in the 21st century we have no need for carburetors at all—they’ve gone the way of breaker points and wood-spoke wheels.