I am ignorant of carbs. As far as I know, AFB and AVS are government organizations. I remember my 69 340 Dart that I bought new, and for 80,000 miles the carb was never touched. That is the kind of reliability I am looking for. The applications are 383's, both auto and manual, stock intakes, four barrells for both. These are not high performance applications. Some people swear by Holleys. I swear AT mine. Others say Carters are junk. Help!

Everybody (or nearly everybody) who says Carter-Brocks are junk are just like you- afraid (or too lazy) to learn to a rather simple procedure.

If you want to own an old car, you better learn how to tune it up. Back in the day, it was common knowledge. And they WEREN'T reliable, either.

BUT

The AFB I had on my PW, (once dialed in) gave me 10 years and almost 100,000 miles of relatively care-free service, and even though the truck is long gone, that same engine is still running around in a 'cuda somewhere.

Here are your options-

A) Take the time to learn how to do it
B) Use EFI in your old car
C) Don't own an old car

Eric

I think somebody woke up with a hangover.

79powerwagon, that's BS. The Dart I mentioned ran flawlessly. The weather (Illinois) was freezing, hot, humid, dry, and that carb was never touched. Sounds like you might know less about carbs than even me.

Mike, what you fail to realize is that the carb that came stock on your car 30 yeears had a team of engineers calibrating and recalibrating it for various conditions before it left the factory. if you take the time to do that with an carb on the market you can get reliable all around performance. no carb or fuel delivery system will work out of the box on every combo. efi is a big investment although far superior to a carb in terms of self adjustment and recalibration for the weather conditions.

if you buya holley and tune it, changes jets, set idle bleeds, adjust your emulsion orifices etc you will have a flawlessly running carb. if you want to buy opne slap it on and go you'll have to deal with the daily mess of non stellar performance.

My suggestion would be a small(500 or 600) edelbrock. For a dependable non hp daily driver it would give better economy than a holley. I would for sure open it up & check it out(even though it's brand new) as the people who put them together have dont give a $hit days just like the rest of us & from past posts the people on the edelbrock 750 line tend to have a whole lot of them type of days.

Jerry, thanks for the input-that does make sense. So, you think reliability is more a function of how the carb is set up?- that it really doesn't matter whether it's a Barry Grant, Carter, or Holley? I will not drive my cars hard enough that I would notice a slight degredation in seasonal performance.

Could try a thermoquad rebuilt by demonsizzler? He can send you one tuned for your application, and I find the t-quads provide great driveability and reliability. I drive mine to work everyday from spring until the snow flies.

Another option is to have the carbs tuned with the car on a dyno by a place like Superior...you'd know the air fuel/etc will all be set spot on that way at least to start with and you shouldn't have to play around with it after that.

My big block applications are one car with factory cast iron manifold, the other an Edelbrock Performer. Will Thermoquads work on both?

If your iron intake is a spread bore type YES & I do believe the performer is a spread bore.

My 4 cyl. Toyota has 208,000 miles and the carb has never been touched, for any reason. Nothing. It runs perfectly. So, like my Dart, this tells me one doesn't necessarily have to mess with carbs. This is the reliability I'm after for my big block. Should not be rocket science.

The closet carb I can think of that you could bolt on right out of the box and work pretty darn good for what you want is a 600 cfm Edelbrock. That should work really well with your stock street 340. I ran one years ago on my 383. It was too small, but it was a great street carb right out of the box. One of the best little street carbs offered today.

Mike,
again looking at your toyota, engineers have spent countless hours and tests to get the mix just right in a variety of conditions. if you need out of the box ready to go, then to some race carb builders, give them your specs of the engine and let them put one together for you. it won't be cheap but will save you alot of time in the long run plus you won't have to tinker with it. the other option is to get a cheap carb and take it to a chassis dyno. pay the tech there to tweak it in for a variety of conditions with different engine loads and that should get you really close on optimal tune. again this could take an hour or it could take 8 of more and at $75/hr thats gonna add up to some change. ultimately for really good tuning spend the bucks and update to efi you'll be glad you did. especially for a driver that sits a while between drives EFI is great. i run it on my cars and wouldn't trade it for anything.

After spending 10 minutes tuning the stock auto choke on my thermoquad I haven't had to tinker with it in 5 years. While I have tinkered with it, it's only been to try out different jetting sizes in the secondaries to see if they made any performance difference. From a driveability standpoint, it's been great. I would suggest you pm david (demonsizzer on here, his homepage is thermoquads.com) but I haven't seen him posting on moparts for a long time now. He used to be pretty active on here.