1955 Kaiser Manhattan 2 door supercharged

[Megapazzoide]

I was visiting someone I met a few years ago, I told this old man that I was looking for a classic car to buy, a project something interesting. He took me to his back yard and one on the cars he showed me was a 1955 Kaiser Manhattan supercharged 2 door. He said it is one of 44 cars made in that year, I did some research and found out it is true what he said, but I still would like to know how rare is really this car, the whole car needs complete restoration, there might be some rust here and there, but the car is over complete, how much should I offer him? he said he might be interested in selling the car. Any help would be appreciated. One more thing he mentioned is that the car has an 8 cylinder engine, that is the original engine and that is not v8 or straight 8 but some different configuration and he reassured me that this is the original engine.
Thanks a lot for any help. I dont have pictures now. I might be able to get some in a couple weeks.

[Megapazzoide]

he might be wrong about the 8 cylinder engine since he does not know much about mechanics but he reassured me it was the original engine, I will take pictures in a couple weeks and post them. I saw the car but not under the hood.

[ben-tex]

Kaiser never produced an 8 cylinder engine. They did experiment with Olds v8 etc and even an in house designed v8 but none of these ever made it to production. And by 1955 it would have been highly unlikely any such work would have been still active as the company was on the way out of passenger car production.

[ben-tex]

Also did you look at the engine? Do you know how to count cylinders? There should be one spark plug per cylinder. In the "correct" Kaiser engine the configuration has all 6 plugs in a line on TOP of the cylinder head. If it is a v8 there will be 2 heads with 4 plugs per head. This is not to be funny or a put down.

[Logan]

Correct, no 8 cylinders were built.  But I would like to see a non-v8, non-inline 8 cylinder engine.  That would have to be a horizontally opposed 8 or X8.  I once met a guy who had an Ariel motorcycle that had a flat 4, i.e two inline 2-cylinder banks next to each other with their crankshafts geared together and spinning in opposite directions.  Of course you can't have a radial 8 because you need to have an odd number of cylinders in order for it to fire evenly.

[kaiserfrazerlibrary]

Remember that with K-F stuff, in the great majority of cases, rare does not equal lots of $$$.  The possibility that it does not have the right drivetrain in it (8 cylinder motor?) is another negative for the person wanting to restore the car to original condition.   I was at a scrap yard that  was being crushed out in the 1990's; there was a 1953 Kaiser Manhattan (or what was left of it) that had a 1940's vintage straight 8 Oldsmobile engine under its hood (or what remained of it...both engine and hood!).