Need Carb advice

[85 Cutlass Brougham]

I love the rivalry amongst carburetors. Holley fans hate q-jets, q-jet fans hate Holleys... :lol:

Holley's don't need to constantly be worked on, you just have to know what you're doing when you set it up. Keep an eye on it sure, but I've only had to tinker with my 4150 a few times since installing it...

No matter what carb you run, do yourself a favor and go to the book store and buy a book about how to tune and modify your carburetor. They're worth their weight in gold.

The Holley Street Avenger is an excellent carb in terms of out of the box performance and reliability, though if I was the one in your shoes, I'd probably just get the Q-Jet rebuilt.

My point exactly. If you have something already which can do the job quite well, why waste money on changing to something else to see no real gains in terms of performance? It's not like it is a bad design, like a Ford Variable Venturi carb of the 70's. Spend money only when you need to and you will end up having money left over to improve the things that make a real difference in the areas of the original design of your car that really sucked....like the wheels and tires, gearing, engine displacement, etc.

 

[St.Pete_MC]

Geesh whats with all the holley hate in here LOL

:lol: 8) :lol:

yeah I say get that q-jet looked at by someone who deals with them.

 

[Phoenyx]

I used to think Hollys were cool. Always hearing about muscle cars with Holly 4 barrels.

But then I actually bought one. And I don't mean some junker off of some old hotrod. I bought a brand new one. Sure, it was cool for the first couple of weeks. But after nothing but problems, I ended up rebuilding my quadrajet and tossing the Holly.

 

[Blake442]

Listen to all these Holley haters! :lol:

I don't know what all you guys are doing wrong here, to tell you the truth...

My Holley 4150 rocks my socks off! They couldn't be simpler to work on, you just need to understand how they function.

Sure, the gas mileage is single digit most of the time, but that's my only real complaint. I might pick up a few mpg's with a modded quadrajet, but I'm not too worried about it.

I think the biggest factor is that people either don't know how to tune them properly, or they're just plain intimidated by the assumed complexity.

Like I said before, go buy the book and you'll be glad you did. Whether you run a Quadra-Jet, Holley, or Edelbrock, it's helps to know what you're up against.

 

[85 Cutlass Brougham]

Well, the Holley's I have owned ( I have 4 right now) have been tuned right. I would get the engine running perfectly, set the mixture with a vacuum gauge, etc. and they would need my attention a week later when the car ran like *ss again. Granted, none of these are recent model Holleys (2 were new when I got them though), but the design has not changed that much on a 3310 since, oh, 1965 when it was first used on the 396. On the other hand, I have had an Edelbrock 600 that other than a change in the step up spring required nothing to run perfectly for a long time. I even used it to deliver pizza for a few months with no issue. The Quadrajet I have on my car now still needs some setup finished on it as the car has not been seriously drivable since before it was swapped on. However, it starts instantly almost every time, and even cold starts instantly without so much as hitting the gas half the time. (The plug wires are very bad and the car misfires enough that it smells rich, but they are 12 years old.) I spend considerable amounts of time getting every last detail of a carburetor set up perfectly when I tune it, and will spend a few days on the choke alone to get the cold starts perfect.

The last time I delivered pizza with a Holley? I used the car for 2 weeks and it would barely run when I was done. Granted this car was NEVER right, but still...

 

[Blake442]

Well, if the car was never right to begin with, it's hard to place the blame solely on the carb...
I have noticed that my Holley is a tad sensitive to high humidity. It gets intensly muggy up here in the summer. You've probably noticed this as well.

On the flip side of your Edelbrock experience... My friend and I put one on his 390 Caddy after we had the motor rebuilt. It ran fantastic right out of the box, for about 120 miles. It then (barely) ran like complete garbage, and no amount of tinkering or adjusting helped. We ended up sending it back, and having the factory four-jet rebuilt. Ran like a top ever since.

And the age old battle continues... :lol:

 

[Phoenyx]

So we have bad things to say about holly, and eddy. Go for the quadrajet. I used to hate these things. But out of all the carbs I've owned, quads have always worked the best.

 

[axisg]

on a DD or a cruiser I vote for the Qjet. If it's a show queen or a 1/4 mile car then Holley Avenger hands down.

I have never had a Holley that would start, idle or part throttle worth a damn ( you could set one or sometimes 2 of the 3 ) but at WOT it always pulled nice and strong whereas the qjet didn't quite have the same feel.

 

[Phoenyx]

^agreed^

 

[85 Cutlass Brougham]

The Quadrajet's big failing is the size of the float bowl. It isn't capacious enough for a serious drag car unless you properly cut down the plastic float retainer (I don't know how, so don't ask.). I will also say that if it fails to pull on the top end, you need to set the air valve door tension lower.