Street/Strip back to cruiser advice

If you want "cruise friendly" consider small primaries, IE TQ or even A QJ. In this day and age of alcoholized fuel, think about EFI

I'm not aware of any EFI kits that are reasonably priced and I'm not a big fan of the TBI setups anyway.

It's either gonna be a TQ or new Edelbrock. Summit sells reman TQ's for $300 and Rock Auto has them for $250. Those prices would be fine assuming they were correctly rebuilt. The internet consensus is that the remans are poorly assembled and often use mismatched parts.

The Carb shop has a few NOS 9801S TQ's for $420 but they are as is with no warranty.