In most instances, when you see a post that says "Bump" on a forum, the original poster feels the topic has gone ignored and he's trying to "bump" the topic back to the top of the stack. There are times when the original poster will use the more cryptic "BTTT", meaning Bump To The Top.
I always have to laugh when people start knocking one carb or another. I always did all the carb work at the shop and I've had more of them apart than I can begin to remember. Not a single one of them had a brain and were capable of thinking on their own. All a carburetor ever does is what we allegedly-intelligent humans set it up to do.
The biggest complaints about Holleys were addressed several years back. Yes, Holleys do have gaskets below the fuel level in the float bowls. And yes, those early cork gasket were notorious for drying out and leaking. Riddle me this - when was the last time you went to a parts store and ended up with a cork gasket for a Holley?
Yes, Holleys do have a vulnerability in those people who cannot properly adjust valves, adjust chokes and set ignition timing can wipe out the diaphragm in the power valve/s. I'll wager a full 75% of the time people would bring a Holley to me with the complaint it wouldn't idle smoothly, the choke blade was either missing or wired open. But since Holley finally caught onto the the trick of putting a check ball in the power valve vacuum passage, those complaints have diminished by a great number.
Another great Holley tuning trick is spraying carb cleaner into the idle and high speed air bleeds, followed by the installation of a
CLEAN air filter. Imagine that, actually trying to keep a carb clean. What a novel concept.
S.M., we got to the point where we rarely ever touched the main jets in the carbs on the race car. If we were going to run at altitude, I might take a number out of the carbs, but for the biggest part, they never got changed. We might tweak on the air bleeds from time to time, but that was it. I've seen guys lose the handle on carb tuning so far, they would have lean carbs making the plugs look like the carbs were fat and vice versa. They would get one so lean the cylinders weren't seeing enough fuel to support combustion and the plugs would come out wet. Or they would get one so fat, the primary tubes would be glowing. We could always accomplish what we were trying to do by taking a half-degree of timing out, or sticking an additional half-degree in.
Russ, the Barry Grant carbs are Holleys by any other name. The only reason the float bowls look a bit different is to forestall any more lawsuits from Holley. The early BG carbs looked a wee bit too close for comfort and the crowd in Bowling Green screamed, "Foul!" All the same parts, working in all the same places as a Holley. With all the negativity surrounding BG these days, I don't know how comfortable I would be in buying one of their carbs. Actually, the last I knew, it was nigh on impossible to buy any of their products.
Johnny, I'm not sure where Carter is in the conglomerate mess we know as Federal Mogul. (Anyone remember the year Federal Mogul and Holley were Hell-bent to own the entire sped industry? They've both been on the brink of financial disaster ever since.) When the Carter AFB was so popular with the OEMs, Carter couldn't keep up with the orders, so they brought Weber into the mix. Who knows how many AFBs were actually manufactured by Weber? When Edelbrock decided to get into the carb market, he contracted Weber to produce the AFBs for his line. So, if you need to replace your Carter carb, think Edelbrock and you'll be in business. Hopefully with Vic's ego out of the way, Edelbrock's new owners can turn that ship around, before it ends up going the way of Crane Cams.
I can't even count the number of QuadraJets that came to me with the complaint of being hard-starting. When I had them apart, I would cover the secondary metering well welch plugs with epoxy and put them under a heat lamp to cure. Those carbs never came back with the same complaint, ever again.
If you're going to do carburetor work, about all that is necessary is to be a bit smarter than the carb. And like I said earlier, I'm yet to see one with a brain.
If you ask me, the fellows that are already using electronic fuel injection are the smart cookies in the jar. Cruise through the parking lot of a local shopping mall and count all the vehicles there that are still equipped with a carburetor. Then again, people gripe and moan about the infinite-tuning options of Holley carbs, so being able to electronically tailor the fuel flow to an engine will likely upset them just as much.
