Anybody Actually Goin' Fast With a Holley 3 BBL?

[markjohnson]

As stated above, I was just wondering if anybody was having any luck with going fast with their Holley 3 BBL's? I know they were popular with Motion cars in particular and I've seen several cars restored with them, but I was wondering if anybody has tried to do anything serious with them lately besides just driving in and out of an enclosed trailer. I actually have two of them right now, a 950 and a 1050 both waiting for me to re-gain my patience again from working with them unsuccessfully in the early-Nineties. Now my father had one back in the Eighties that would just absolutely fly. No hesitation or anything, it would break the tires loose and accelerate 'til you saw God or the police seen you, whatever came first.

[69 Post Sedan]

Mark, I just noticed this thread. I would like to bring it up to the top. I am interested to hear what people say about these because I too would like to run one of these for the "Day 2 " look.

I have heard/read that they sucked and don't use it, along with it ran great on someone else's car.

Kurt

[jtower1969]

I asked the same question to my Dad when I was doing my motor over..I was told a few ran good..most didn't. I went with a Baker Preped 950 HP Holley...Runs like a beast.

[markjohnson]

I had spent a lot of money on my 950 CFM unit, even adding a secondary metering plate to it, and was using it in conjunction with an old Edelbrock C427X dual plane intake on top of my L-88. I thought I actually had it dialed in and running good for a while there. Then one day I pulled it off for some reason I don't even remember and just threw on a box-stock 850 Holley DP and I gotta tell 'ya.....it felt like I had installed a Nitrous system because the car felt so much faster. Needless to say the 850 DP stayed on permanently and the 950 3BBL went into a box in the basement where it remains to this day.

[PxTx]

I think this is a pretty common experience with many people. Not described too scientifically so I'm gonna assume you don't have much data on the differences between the ways the carbs were set-up.

Motion commonly modified them with mechanical secondries, which then required the trick secondary squiter mod to help with the big secondary venturi opening.

Were both still vacuum secondaries? How about the accelerator pump configs like cam, squirter size etc?

The metering plate you referenced, did you mean a metering block, or did you install a modified/different metering plate?

I agree, they may be difficult to tune but there are better resources available these days. Joel made them run by puting them on a dyno and using an exhaust gas analyser to tune each circuit. Now you can use a wide band O2 and drive it on the road and log data.

I am confident that they can still be tuned to make respectable HP and decent drivability. Maybe not quite as good as a modern carb, but certainly within a few percentage points.


[ QUOTE ]
I had spent a lot of money on my 950 CFM unit, even adding a secondary metering plate to it, and was using it in conjunction with an old Edelbrock C427X dual plane intake on top of my L-88. I thought I actually had it dialed in and running good for a while there. Then one day I pulled it off for some reason I don't even remember and just threw on a box-stock 850 Holley DP and I gotta tell 'ya.....it felt like I had installed a Nitrous system because the car felt so much faster. Needless to say the 850 DP stayed on permanently and the 950 3BBL went into a box in the basement where it remains to this day.

[/ QUOTE ]

[Chevy454]

Some of the old guys over at Speedtalk said they were the stuff until the modern stuff came along...but you *really* had to know your way around a Holley, or it wouldn't work. I think Joe Sherman said his 3 barrel was 10-15hp up on his commparable 4-barrel at the time...?