Hey Eugene
Yes, the hood hinge on Barb's intimidator was screwed to the back of the seat as it came, making it pretty difficult to remove the back seat, so we changed that, now it's screwed to the cross brace behind the seat.
Glad you got the run on your new motor, looks good too. Those manifolds have a striking resemblance to the EMI manifolds, which are a dry joint style, but it looks like to me that the thermostat housing is designed for a wet joint style, or did we talk about that ?
I'm kinda partial to the Edlebrock carbs, especially the thunder series, because they are so easy to tune, but there is nothing wrong with running a Holly, but they are a bit more difficult to change the jets if you want to change it's performance aspect, more-so if it's a dual line, just my opinion. The Rochester quadrojet is a good carb also, they been around almost as long as the Carter, but the most common problem with them, rebuilding them, is that the throttle shaft wears sooner than the others, it seems to me, making it difficult to set the low speed needles. Carter became Weber, and Zenith I think before that, but now days the design is produced by Edelbrock. There are two kinds, the performer series is like the old afb, and the thunder series is like the old avs, air valve series, it has a secondary "flapper" above the secondary butterflies, kinda like the quadrojet, easilly adjustable to prevent a "bog" on an immediate full throttle exceleration. The 650 that you ran on the motor already is probly the best carb you have available in my opinion, it's not too big, and with the exhaust, heads and cam you are running, it would produce good power @ 5000 / 5200 rpm.