Even rarer than a Fageol flat-eight: A Crosley V-8

As rare as the Crosley-Fageol flat-8 engine is, at just a baker’s dozen rumored to have ever been built, even rarer is the Crosley-based V-8. When I bought my lot of Crosley engines a couple years ago, the seller told me about a Crosley-based V-8 that his father once owned and which a group of collectors bought for buku bookoo bucks after searching high and low for it. I haven’t been able to uncover a thing more about that engine since then, not even a photo.

I was led to believe that V-8 was professionally built, possibly for racing and possibly by Bandini, so I have a suspicion the Crosley V-8 pictured above is not the same engine. Found on the Crosley club’s website along with a caption that notes that the engine appeared at the club’s gathering in Wauseon in 1989, it depicts a rather crude V-8 built up from two CoBra blocks. The crankcase looks professionally designed and machined, but one would have to wonder a) why anybody would use tin blocks for this purpose, b) why one wouldn’t use a standard and a mirror block to put the intake and exhaust for both halves in the valley, and c) why one would cut off the camshaft timing towers?

So can anybody shed more light on either of these two V-8s?