The 350 on my 1970 Camaro came with a 2-barrel Holley. My
first replacement for it, was a cast-iron spread bore 4-barrel
intake manifold from the junkyard that I painted orange and
made a plate for the EGR. Rochester 4-barrel carb on top,
it had these tiny primaries and HUGE secondaries. Made
terrific sounds, great power. Great high school car.
Next up, Edelbrock came out with this new "Performer"
aluminum intake manifold - very early 80's - called the
2101 I think (40 years ago!) which had AWESOME flow bench
bench numbers compared to the cast-iron intake I had.
There was this mythical LT-1 OEM aluminum intake that
Chev put into the Z-28 but I could never find one in a
junkyard. I think Edelbrock started with that:
So I next went to the 2101 and it was AWESOME! It was
tempting to over-carburate but I simply didn't have the
cylinder heads for that much flow, so I went with a sensible
square-bore O-1850 Holley square-bore 600 cfm with
vacuum secondaries for great throttle response. In retrospect
I should have gone with the double-pumper 600.
The 600 Holley with the 2101 Edelbrock was a fantastic
street combination 40 years ago. Weight saving were
good, flow numbers were up.
These days, I would have swapped out the heads for some
high-flow aluminum aftermarket heads for even more weight
savings and power, and a matching roller lifter camshaft!
We didn't have that stuff, back then. I always looked in the
junkyards for some 2.02 intake double-bump small chamber
iron heads but I never found any.
It was superb training and great fun. 40 years later, I'm still
doing the same stuff.
I hate to admit it, but the next V-8 I do, is going to have one
of those aftermarket fuel injector replacements for the carb.
Two huge advantages:
1) no flow loss due to ventures
2) with an O2 sensor, the computer tunes itself for an AFR of 13.
See, the big problem with the Holley carburetor is that you
MUST fuck with it, to get it to run right. All sorts of fiddly
changes and tuning that just starts with the jets. Float levels,
etc.
Without a chassis dyno, you're fucked, though these days I
would install an O2 sensor and a data logger (with maybe a TPS
and MP and RPM) so that I could review the drive and tune
the Holley that way.
I pulled the chokes off mine. It did not like the cold. You had
to blip the throttle to squirt the accelerator pumps (another
adjustment on the Holley) to keep it running until it warmed up.
It was a pain in the @ss, but when you were a teenager in 1980
a new Holley 4-bbl on a new Edelbrock intake was a pretty neat
setup.
Dark days for automobiles, back then. Ralph Nader and various
communists like Jimmy Carter (huge fan of Pol Pot) had take over.
I was really unpopular. I didn't give a shit. Some things never change.
