how large of a carb can perform well on stock 273 commando ?

We had a 1403? 500 cfm on my son's 318 with a small cam and 273 Commando intake. It ran good but I found an original 4295s, rebuilt it and it runs much better. If I remember right, your original Carb, 4119s, was in bad shape? Some of the Carter 600 cfm carbs would not open the secondaries on the original manifold... I measured a 4294s and it only has 1 9/16 secondary blades. Did you check to see if your secondaries are opening after you installed it? Also the secondary air valve is heavy on the Edelbrock compared to stock Commando.

My original carb was shot. Being a stick car it had been opened and closed a million times in 100,000 miles. The throttle shafts were worn and I replaced them with ones from a automatic carb which were in good shape. The butterflies never seated in the bores very good and it doesn't idle very well. I put the Edelbrock on as a test carb and never took it off. My biggest idle quality problem was spark plug heat range. $ heat ranges hotter than the Autolites I had in and the problem was fixed. tmm