Another "Is Fuel Injection a Worthwhile Upgrade?" Question

I'm with Rusty on this one, I think your post #290 is fair except the last line. To the OP, apologize for going off track. My original intention was to be able to get a consensus on what the drawbacks were to carbs and what EFI could do for someone assuming that whoever was installing it is willing to put in the work there.

The Holley Sniper does seem to have options that can be tuned manually if desired. I would say at minimum someone would need to avoid a system with no user changeable tables.

I had the same carb you do, and it does have the capability to be tuned to run well for your application and I doubt if you got there you would have much of a concern with it's performance so long as the engine is warm and you aren't looking for good fuel mileage (and it sounds like you aren't). At a minimum, I would say you'll be into the power valve, air bleeds, accellerator pump cams and squirters to dial it in. The converter will mask some of it. The power valve is almost certainly wrong, I don't know why they say anything about idle vaccum for the power valve because you absolutely do not get good performance if you use that advice. You want to get it running okay at cruise in a high vacuum situation with a vacuum gauge handy and then try driving up a hill where the load would be increased and see when it goes lean and try to have the power valve open just before that. Carbs should probably come with a 9.5 or 10.5 power valve instead of a 6.5. Then you get into air bleeds and squirters and the like to get everything where it performs the best. Same with timing, its very unlikely you engine likes anything near a stock amount of timing up front, fairly likely it will be in the 15-25 range from my experience, but this is an easy one to find at idle and then you can adjust the total in your e-curve distributor accordingly. That's a big advantage over a stock distributor.

If you go the Sniper route, you will spend a lot more time making a fuel system, since you really should have an in tank pump and a return system with a bypass regulator. Its significantly more up front effort than a carb fuel system since most of us can get by with the OE tank/line and just run a dead head on a mechanical pump, and maybe not need a regulator. Then you do the wiring. Once you get past that, I think you can close in on the tune to be driving in a satisfactory way a faster even with the autotune feature (but not going to say you won't be tweaking manually). I think you run the same distributor on both in this case since you have it and only have the sniper do fuel. So that won't change. I think you will pick up MPG with the sniper and the cold engine performance will likely be better but if that's not a concern no worries. It also costs money to do it.

You already spent the money so if you are really on the fence, maybe trying what you have already is the right move.


So there are no drawbacks to EFI? Got it. UNREAL.