Is it worth it? Replacing your carburetor with a Holley Sniper EFI | Hagerty DIY

hi I'm Dave and Rekha with Haggerty in our DIY series you might remember this 289 hypo build and our red line rebuild series and this baby is running beautifully we got a Holley carburetor and points ignition but today what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this to the engine dyno and we're gonna see what type of numbers it lays down so we can make a comparison to when we install a Holley sniper EFI system on it and replace this carburetor so this efi installation is going to go on our ford 289 but keep in mind what really is required here is a four-barrel intake manifold and if you don't have a for braille and you only have a two barrel there's a two barrel sniper as well now don't be intimidated by the pieces it's very basic the throttle body that will replace our carburetor we have to add an o2 sensor the mash of wires and our user interface so this throttle body requires 50 pounds of pressure our mechanical pump is only going to supply seven we had to purchase this extra kit that allows us to put an electric fuel pump that will supply that 50 pounds first thing I'm gonna start with is by looking through this instruction manual they did a nice job of laying out what needs to happen this is pretty straightforward on both the carburetor both this down the electrical piece might be a little intimidating however in the back of this is a very easy setup now what I did is I've walked through all the wires that are on here and what my system actually requires what it boils down to to keep this simple and the engine dyno we're not going to have an electric fan to control we're not going to control the timing and we're not going to turn on and off an air conditioning pump we're also not using a crank trigger or a CDI box I need this main harness and I've walked through and labeled the five wires that I need to connect Keyon I need a coil wire something to trigger the fuel pump of course battery power and a main ground that's it everything else is plug-and-play directly into this unit there is no external computer it's all right here now before we get started with the EFI installation we're going to take this carbureted engine over to the engine dyno and get some base performance numbers electronic fuel injection will provide improved reliability and certainly improved efficiency that in fishin C can translate into more power now the question truly is how much more power so this morning we drove down to Apex competition engines and John's gonna help us with the engine dyno [Music] when we put the carbureted engine onto the dyno the main issue we had was when we did the first dyno sweep the engine would not go past 4,500 rpm it would break up what we found out was the points were floating or bouncing at 4500 so we were at the limitations of a point distributor at that point we swapped in a MSD magnetic pickup distributor and that cured the problem because it does not rely on a mechanical function it is an electrical function at that point it's a little odd here in the torque curve and the same kind of a dip further on in the horsepower but 330 non torque 282 on horse not horrible but I think that's a pretty good baseline for our carburetor not bad we're back from the engine dyno our numbers look pretty nice now let's get the carburetor off and see what the EFI does for us so the objective of this exercise is to get a baseline for our hi-po 289 redline build with a carburetor in points distributor now at the same time we want to see if there's any performance gains with a sniper EFI to illustrate how simple fuel injection systems have become and to do that we're going to do it on the test stand opposed to in a vehicle so it can be seen easily all right let's get this air cleaner out of the way throttle stand out let's get this fuel line out of here all right so few lines out of the way let's get this vacuum line out here out of four bolts now speaking with a highly tech this dual plane intake manifold is gonna give me an issue with the efi because it's going to want to surge and what that means is a carburetor wants a pulse to pull fuel through the carburetor the EFI doesn't care but what it needs is a big volume so what fuels both sides of the engine at the same time that's where this spacers gonna come in now if hood clearance is an issue and this spacer is not going to allow the air cleaner to sit below your hood then what you can do is you can take cut this divider down about an inch and that will provide that open area that the that the fuel injection needs now obviously you're not going to do that on the engine and get metal shavings down into the intake so what you would do is pull this intake manifold off cut it out and put it back on now obviously these studs are not going to be long enough so I had to go down to the auto parts store and grab some longer studs [Music] off the back of the throttle body we have two parts first the biggest one is is for positive crankcase ventilation and the second one I'm going to use for my vacuum advance on the distributor and the carburetor is up off the side it's the same signal over here we need to add the fuel Inlet and a return line back to the tank this has an internal pressure regulator so we don't need to add any external regulator you know two sensor connection this is for the this is actually it's not used this is for the main harness and this is for the user interface and this one is also not used so you just place any electric pump into your fuel line with the filters if your current fuel system does not have returned turn line you will need to add a return line to your tank now since the throttle body utilizes that electric fuel pump for more pressure this mechanical pump can go away and to do that you're gonna take these two bolts out completely remove it eliminate this the eliminate the line going up to the car bear and of course the one to the year two your fuel tank once this is off you utilize a block off plate to put in there and seals the oil from coming out of the timing cover for our purposes we're gonna take our inlet hose and connect it to our outlet hose and completely bypass the mechanical pump so Holley provides an o2 sensor with the kit and they say that the placement of that is 1 to 10 inches from the collection point of the exhaust so roughly our collection point is right here one the 10 inches actually is the length of the collector I'm gonna split the difference and put it right about in the middle here alright so let's put our hole in here in the past you would need to remove the exhaust header and then weld a bung into this position for your o2 sensor to thread into holly's come up with this pretty unique idea of putting this seal on here and then using T clamps to hold this on completely eliminating the need to weld so this is super simple gasket plate two of these clamps boom you can do this right in your driveway and never take this header off or weld just before it's tight make sure it lines up nice and smooth of that hole well I got one connection underneath to the test stand for kion so there's a fuse box underneath here that I'm connecting the kion wire similar what you'll do in your car so now for power source to the unit I'm gonna grab my battery power off the inlet side of the starter solenoid so on this test and and in the vehicle obviously I'm gonna make sure I don't have any wires laying against the exhaust and in the way of any rotating parts just run my power leads over to the coil for the test stand put our coolant temp sensor in and this last little two wire plug is for the temp sensor all right our EFI is completely installed we get all the wiring in we get it tucked away from any moving parts in the exhaust and our fuel lines are on when we power this up it's going to cycle the electric fuel pump that'll give us a chance to check for any leaks and then we're going to walk through the setup procedure within the EFI system the first time you key on the handheld is going to pop up to the wizard now this wizard is what's used to establish the initial calibration in tune relative to your particular setup follow the detailed instructions that came in the kit now if you lost those detailed instructions they are available online at Hawley comm [Laughter] how about bananas man it fired up like that it searched around just a little bit for idle and if you noticed it didn't start learning until it hit about a hundred and sixty degrees now at that point in your vehicle you would take take it out on the road and run with it let it learn it'll figure itself out and it'll be happy now in our case we're gonna take it to engine dyno we're gonna do some dyno pulls on it and see what kind of power it makes well back here at Apex competition engines we have our engine on the dyno still we put on the efi and we've ironed out one little issue and that was with the aftermarket ignition had a tack sweep so basically what it was saying is the the if I was seeing 9,000 rpm on the initial Keyon well that was kind of freaking out the efi and saying holy cow i got to have a whole bunch of fuel so it was flooding with the injectors that problem is solved so we're gonna warm this up to 160 degrees that's when the efi starts to learn now different from being started up on an engine stand where there is no load the dyno can put load to it and basically simulate driving down the road in your car we're gonna do that let it learn kind of figure itself out and we'll have some good solid numbers from the dyno so now we can compare where the carburetor is at relative to the efi [Music] [Applause] carburetor fuel injection so just shy a 300 horse and 329 foot-pounds of torque all right so my initial reaction is yes but so we know so I think this tells me two things a our torque being flat is good on the on the carburetor this is fine this tells me baby two things one it's the carburetors not quite big enough so the EFI is gonna naturally going to flow more because it's technically bigger far as the butterfly isn't that our concern so you're gonna get a little more airflow in here you can certainly throw more fuel at it and we're seeing that here too as far as the air fuel ratio numbers we're getting more fuel all the way through the curve at the end of the day this is smoother torque ways smoother horsepower I think it's a win power wise for the efi now we've had a few struggles getting there but try in which all system system type stuff and and some of it is just purely being on the on the dyno relative into a car you're not gonna have as much versatility in the car it's gonna be what it is all that type of stuff you can't run the the RPM sweep when it tack sweep when it fires up that pukes the daylights out of it but I think as a brief wrap-up it runs what a lot smoother it starts instantly instant I don't think it makes more than a half a revolution and it's running so the great debate carburetor versus EFI can the carburetor make more power or the same power as EFI absolutely can they both be as efficient absolutely not the EFI is in theory constantly making adjustments to the fuel curve it is continually learning it is changing relative to the temperature and elevation environment the carburetor does relative to what the demands but it does not know what the incoming air temperature is and how that volumetric efficiency and all those things are going to occur within that engine so my conclusion the EFI is more reliable relative to consistent performance it's also going to eliminate that cold start issue I'm not fiddling with a choke whether it's a manual or automatic it's gonna have improved efficiency relative to let's just use a fuel economy as an example meaning it's going to set that ideal fuel ratio all the time so at the end of the day cleaner performance in more like a modern daily driver car then I think EFI is your bet now to wrap this up I want to thank John at Apex competition engines for letting us chew up in his day on the engine dyno and lastly please click and subscribe and we'll see in the next one all right our EFI is completely he told me to go on my fault

Channel: Hagerty

Views: 989,516

Rating: 4.8746743 out of 5

Keywords: Hagerty, Classic Car, Classic Cars, Hagerty Drivers Club, carburetor, carb, holley, sniper efi, efi, electronic fuel injection, fuel injection, v8, four-barrel, four barrel, do it yourself, mechanics, engine upgrades

Id: M2u7d8kajVI

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020