the only drawback to a carb is offroading at sever angles the truck trys to die, i just floor it and hit the angles hard so i get thru stuff before it dies. efi has the advantage that way anyhow.

 

Ya but I don't Plan on going on to extreme of hills. If i do have trouble I'm running a quadrajet and if you turn it around its supposed to do good on angles from what I hear

 

I think what I'll try is 1 solid mount on the drivers side and either a poly mount or a stock mount on the passenger side. Anyone running it this way and have anything bad or good to say about this setup? Is this way gonna pull up on the drivers side of the frame? I feel like when you would hammer it and the motor twists it would pull up on the solid and compress the passenger poly mount? Maybe I'm wrong but that seems like what it would do. Not sure if that would hurt anything or not though???

 

That and you don't have to fight it to get it running in the morning... I'll take being able to go out on a 20* morning and have it fire right up and be ready to go in about a minute over an idle lope any day. Then there's the better drivability, better fuel economy, next to no routine tuning, better reliability, lower emissions....

 

Like I said earlier, there is only one disadvantage EFI has compared to a carb, it relies on so many things to work right. For everyone who's not interested in working on their own vehicle and 99% of those of us who are, that disadvantage is far outweighed by everything else, especially since the "so many things" are pretty darn reliable and usually not that hard to figure out when they don't work.

But there is the 1% of us who want a carb, and they aren't wrong.

I had an aftermarket EFI on my Bronco. It had a horrible dead spot in the fuel delivery curve that really hurt driveability. I'm sure it could have been worked out, or I'm sure I could have found a different EFI system (especially a factory one) that would have been better, but i went the cheap and easy route and stuck a carb back on. It ain't perfect but it's good enough and it was the cheapest, easiest way to go in that case for me.

And I spent months trying to track down a code problem on my son's Jeep Cherokee. It was throwing a bunch of codes, seeming to center around the crank sensor. Replacing the crank sensor would fix it for a few weeks, but it kept coming back. After about 6 months of work and over $500 of new parts it turned out to be a bad ground connection. You don't have those issues with carbs. Of course you rarely have them with EFI, and they are always solvable when you do. But carbs do have this one slight advantage, and if that tips the scales for someone, then fine.

Overall I'm in the 99%. I can't see ever putting a carb in my '97 in place of the EFI. But that doesn't mean that everyone who wants to swap in a carb is wrong. And in Steve's case, he's got an '83 engine he's swapping in. It doesn't have EFI, so he'd have to add it. Staying with it's original carb isn't a dumb thing to do (in spite of all of the advantages EFI could give him).

And by the way, I've been told the Autolite 2 bbl is one of the best carbs for working at weird angles. That's what I put in my Bronco and it works great in rock-crawling. The Holley I had in my old CJ5 had a lot more trouble.

 

That's another reason I'm going carbed is because I already had a carburetor for the truck and I didn't want to spend money on am efi system even though I probably could get one cheap at a junkyard. But then I have to figure out all the wires and I hate wires

 

No. I have the thumpr cam in my Chevelle and love it. It's not an all out performance cam, but it does quite well and sounds great.

 

worth noting in conjunction with Nothin special's post...another huge advantage of a carb vs EFI is power adding. no cheaper way to tune. . .we are limited to a few cam selections that will work with SD, with a carb you just start pickin stuff, slap it together, and tune the carb for peanuts vs custom tuning.


carb still wont make the total power that efi will, but it still rips and rips good. one thing I don't like about carbs is they still suck fuel on downshifts....in addition to stalling on heavy incline angles.

 

About how much more horsepower does efi have over a carb?

 

impossible question to answer, too many variables from one setup to another. closest thing I can suggest, without writing a book on the subject, is a blanket percentage. with identical setups, efi with a competent and quality tune should unlock 5-10% more power than a carb'd version of the same setup. quality carb tune to quality efi tune; 10% might be generous to the efi setup...but then again it might not be. you can push limits with efi that you couldn't even explore with a carb.

 

Like what limits?

 

dammit kid lol


fully customizable fuel and timing curves/tables...allows for absolute optimization of any particular setup. exploring limits would be dyno pull after dyno pull (or street test after street test), making adjustments until its a finely tuned masterpiece on the brink of detonating to death or melting the engine down. of course, once limits are reached, back it off a hair. . .with a carb youre stuck inside certain parameters. inside those parameters, you can fine tune to make it run its best, in a similar fashion you'd tune efi (dyno pulls and/or street test), but you wont have the ability to definitively change or alter an entire fuel or timing curve. you can do it all with efi...and do it precisely.


I don't want to sound like carbs aren't worth having, because they are when the situation dictates their use. they work and work well when tuned properly...its just that you have options with efi in the form of variable input that just cant be done with carbs.


if engines were guns, a carb engine would be an accurate gun that could shoot consistently in the circle around the bullseye. the efi engine would be a gun that could shoot inside the bullseye every time.

 

A simpler (and less complete) way to say what '89F2urd said is that it's easier and cheaper to get carbs pretty close, even if you've made big changes in other areas (like cam, intake / exhaust flow, etc). But you can almost never get carbs just right, under all conditions, at all times. So you are usually leaving a little power, mileage and driveability "on the table".

EFI, on the other hand, can be dialed in almost perfectly almost all the time, under almost all conditions. If you make big changes from the factory in other areas it might be tricky to get EFI back to perfect, but especially if you've got a pretty much stock engine EFI will almost always be better.

 

Assuming both are tuned well they're pretty equal in power if everything else is equal. The EFI truck intake is tuned for low end grunt and your not going to get that easily with a carb'd manifold.

Cam choices are very limited with speed density, but they do open up considerably with mass air flow or with aftermarket EFI setups.

So now you start to see how most comparisons become apples to oranges.

EFI really shines in drivability. Take a trip to the mountains and you're fine. Summer or winter it tunes itself to run perfect. It also makes it easy to add power adders like turbos and such. I've seen massive dry nitrous setups that add 400+ hp and the EFI adds the fuel. Sure, they were race engines with some pricey hardware, but the hardware needs to be to get 1,000+hp out of a 302. There's no reliable, easy way to do that with a carb.

That motor wad cool. 13:1, forged bottom, aftermarket block, Yates heads, sheet metal intake, motec efi, aluminum rods and lots more. Made close to 600hp at around 8,700 if I recall. They pushed it will over 1,000 with bucket loads of nitrous. They ran it to 9,300 rpms. That was around '02 at Second Street Speed in Perkasie Pa.

 

How come you can't get low end grunt with a carb?