Holley Carburator

May 28, 2000

Background | Installation | Cost | Postscript

Background

I had nothing but trouble with my old worn out Autolite 2-barrel carb. Black smoke, racing when pointed down hill, backfires, rough running, etc. Since I have a Clifford intake manifold already, it would be easy to go to a 4-barrel carb. After quite a bit of research and pricing, I decided on a Holley 390 from Foure Wheel Drive hardware. It sounded like a good combo of economy, power, and ease of maintenance. I also had to buy a different adapter plate from Clifford to accomodate the 4bbl.

Installation

The carb install took a couple of hours total. It was very straight-forward. The only tricky part was the throttle linkages. I had to make a custom bracket to accommodate the cables for the accellerator pedal and the hand- throttle.

While I was working under the hood, I took the rest of the afternoon to replace the radiator, spark plugs, plug wires, distributor cap, battery, and air cleaner.

Once it was all done, I tried to fire it up. It hadn't been run in almost a year, and I had just replaced a lot of stuff on the engine. I wasn't sure what to expect. After about 20 seconds of cranking, it fired up and ran smoothly. Whoo hoo! Susan even came out and said, "Oh my god! It runs."

I still had a tendency to backfire through the intake when you step on it hard, especially when cold. I advanced the timing which helped some. I then changed the accellerator pump cam and squirters to give more fuel earlier under hard accelleration. This helped quite a bit. It still hasn't completely fixed the problem, but it is much better.

Cost

Postscript

6/4/00 - I went on a run with the BushHackers that was supposed to be an easy day with mostly stock rigs. I thought that would be a good way to test out the new carb. It turned out to be a much more challenging run, but Popper did great and the carb worked well. The problems with engine racing was gone. I did have one time in an extreme uphill where I stalled the engine and it took a few cranks to get going again.

6/02 - Once I installed an air/fuel mixture gauge, I was able to properly tune it and correct all the issues that were left.