twiceasfastasyou

Hello, just joined up to hear some wise words of experienced stang tuners, since i hung around and delt with too many import tuners, as the nissan section over at automotiveforums has lately become raped with honda H22/K20A3 owners, and seem to find your crowd to be more calm and well-reserved. anyway, now that I've gotten the interest of finding out the main difference between domestic muscle car workings, and the guts of imports, I wanted to start off with the simple questions of carburetion vs port-fuel injection. Someone enlighten me as to what the main advantages/disadvantages are to tuning a carbureted engine, to a port-fuel injected engine (fuel injected i have great knowledge about, but comparing the two is what I am asking for). If someone is willing to type up a quick report/summary, I;d love it, since my dad always tells me that no matter what vehicle I get, it will never be as powerful or aggressive as his '71 challenger.

alright then, enough chatter, lets hear it!

88blackgt

carbed is great when you're on a budget. it takes an intake manifold, a carb, a fuel line, and a fuel pump. no need for injectors, air metering systems blah blah blah. the carb meters the air flow itself. it also doesnt need the support of the ecu other wiring, so it is good for swaps if you dont like wiring. another advantage of carbs is that they dont try to correct things on their own, so they better reflect how the car is running(instead of the ecu trying to fix it by changing everything). carbs dont require a host of other sensors to function correctly, so there is one less thing to go wrong. carbs are fairly easy to tune too. carbs also atomize fuel better than fuel injection.

one disadvantage would be rejetting and retuning the carb based on things like temp and elevation. another disadvantage is it usually doesnt work as well with forced induction(yes there are alot of great blow/draw through setups, but they arent as common).

i guess a broad generalization(very broad) is that carbs are great for their simplicity and usually better for race-only applications or extremely budget minded builds, whereas fuel injection has better flexibility and driveability.

Colorado_Mustang

If you don't mind spending a lot of time tuning your engine, get a carb. Properly kept in tune, they will return more power and efficiency. The problem is, most people don't have the time/resources/knowledge to keep a carb at 100%. For a DD, I'd stick with EFI...even though I keep my carbs near 100%.

GreyStang

Really? How come? Because there is longer distance from the fuel source & the combustion chamber?

As far as I'm concerned, carbs have no advantage over FI except for that they're simpler & cheaper. Who says a properly set up FI engine is gonna be weaker or less efficent than a properly set up carb engine?

JD1969

I agree Grey, in this age of technology there is no reason that FI should not out perform a carb in every aspect, except cost, and thats getting better. Systems like F.A.S.T and Big Stuff 3 are downright amazing with what they are capible of. Even Hillbourn has a cool newer system that looks like the old school machanical injection, but comes with it's own stand alone managment system. There are those that will be carb guys till they die and thats fine, I used to think that way too, that is until I figured out how to tune FI and realized that I could have big power AND decent drivability and fuel economy.

bluegill

Actually at wide open throttle carburators almost alway make more power than fuel injection with all else in the engine is the same. This has been dyno proven quite a few times over the years. Chevrolet recently introduced a carb manifold for their LS1 engines. It too outperformed the EFI at wide open throttle when it was dyno tested. With a little patience and some common sense carbs are not that hard to keep in tune, and there a whole lot simpler and cheaper. That said, carbs do tend to take a back seat to EFI when it comes to part throttle response and all weather drivabilty. That's direct port injection, not that throttle body crap. The fact that the air is dry all the way to the back of the intake valve is the reason. There is no fuel to potentially fall out of atomization at part throttle when the port and runner velocity has slowed down. If you already have a carb system in your car, use it, it works. No real real advantage to switching to EFI, unless you have more money than you know what to do with. If you already have a good EFI in your car, use it, it works too.

My old '74 F-150 had a 390 auto. primitive points ignition and 2v carb, and no overdrive and 2.98 gear ratio. Got 17-18 mpg. My '92 F-150 with the 302 had all the fancy schmancy direct port fuel injection and electronic ignition, and AOD, got 17-18 mpg... And couldn't hold a candle the the '74 in the pulling power department...

Mike