LOW BUCK CARB TEST-DO THEY WORK?

double throw down holley ultra xp or low buck brawler time for a 750 shootout [Music] i have to admit i was very excited when holly introduced this ultra xp carburetor because let's face it it's lightweight and lightweight is the same as having more power because it's all about power to weight ratio so if you prove one end of the scale you can improve the other end of the scale and it's always good plus those carburetors just look awesome i mean they look racy they work well we know that because we use them all the time i just walk over the carburetor cabinet at westec stick whatever size i want on their 650 750 850 950 1000 whatever we want they even have them in dominators we run those a lot and they work really well they're cool they're lightweight so they got a lot of stuff going for them but when i do these videos i get a lot of comments hey richard why are you using those thousand dollar carburetors on a 400 horsepower small block chevy or small block ford or whatever we happen to be running on and really that's a valid point i mean first of all i'm guilty of it being cool so when i go to the when i go to the cabinet pick a carburetor i'm definitely going to pick the cool one because it's there and it's available we know that it works it works great and it looks awesome so i'm guilty of that but the reality is those comments are valid for a normal street combination for a 400 horsepower motor whether it's a ford or chevy a big block or small block whatever it is for a mild combination what people want to know is is there a better choice than the thousand dollar carburetor just to go run around and maybe take it to the track or whatever is there a low cost option to the ultra xp yes there is i have to admit that when holly a few years back introduced the brawler carburetor their brawler series i was not as enthusiastic about that as i was when they introduced the ultra xp you know the high zoot stuff and the reality is i should have been in fact i should have been more excited about the brawler carburetor because i'm a low buck guy i mean i'm the guy that goes to the wrecking yard picks up those greasy motors much to see brulee's dismay and tries to run them on the dyno and make them better for the lowest amount of you know money possible and we try to get the most power out of it so when holly introduced the brawler i should have been all over it and actually eventually i was i i came to enjoy them and use them a lot on a lot of these junkyard motors and they work well but a few years back i actually got a chance to do a back-to-back test comparing the brawler to the ultra xp because we had both of them we had a motor on the dyno i mean it was an easy thing to test so i wanted to find out now we like the ultra xp and as i said we've used it a lot we use it all the time i go grab that's kind of our go-to carburetor because it's there and it's easy to use and it works well but i wanted to find out how well does it actually work i mean it's almost a thousand dollars in our case when we when we priced them this was about 930 or 940 through summit and if you take a look at a brawler carburetor it's less than half that so that begs the question if it costs less than half of the really high dollar race carburetor does it deliver half of the performance and as we found out the answer is no in fact it delivers almost the same performance so let's check it out [Music] right off the bat the ultra xp is an impressive carburetor we know that it works well we've run it a lot it's got an aluminum body that's 38 lighter than its predecessor and as we know less weight same as more power the ultra xp has some cool stuff sight plugs clear on both sides both bowls to decrease the chance of fuel starvation holley increased the size of the fuel bolts they increased capacity by 20 percent the bowls feature drain plugs to make jet changes easy the ultra xb carburetors feature contour venturi inlets billet metering blocks and a billet base plate each bowl also features dual fuel inlets the carburetors also feature an integrated bypass valve a fuel shelf and internal baffling to prevent aeration though we ran our ultra xp on gas holley also makes them available for e85 and methanol [Music] if we take a look at the brawler carburetor it has a lot of similar features nice venturi although it does have a choke horn we do have sight plugs clear sight plugs just the fuel level dual fuel the inlets are available with a mechanical or electric choke the brawlers can be had with either mechanical or vacuum operated secondaries take a look inside see we've got air bleeds nice little trick for tuning the brawler also has billet metering blocks and billet base plate well we've taken a look at the specifications of both carburetors we've taken a look at how they visually appear how they look and obviously the most important thing obviously is price the difference between the two you know the ultra double throw down wishbone ellicott hush puppy shoe wearing crumb cake ultra xp and the low cost brawler mauler staller you know what it's been called a lot of things but there's a big difference obviously in price but is there a big difference in performance now we're going to take a look at a back-to-back test i ran on a small block ford this particular ford was a 351 windsor but honestly it doesn't really matter what engine we put it on to compare them it would work the same on the same kind of horsepower small block chevy or big block as a matter of fact i wanted to point out the fact that a lot of times i'll get comments from people that say hey look what what exact jetting did you use on this carburetor for this combination because i'm trying to duplicate that and what they don't realize is that we go to the carburetor cabinet where we have 650 750 850 950 dominators and we will go grab a carburetor that was just run on a 468 inch big block and stick it right on top of a 300 inch small block and you know what happens what happens is it works really well because carburetors do they do their job very well they actually meter the fuel based on the air flow and so they're pretty good at doing their job now obviously you might want to do jetting to optimize the thing assuming that that combination responds to jetting because sometimes they don't sometimes you stick a carburetor on there and it's eleven and a half to one and you think okay great i'm gonna tune some power out of this thing and you take change the jetting and you bring it up to twelve to one or twelve two to one and it just doesn't really pick up any power and this is especially true with the torque peak seems to be more so than a horsepower peak so know in advance that if you take a carburetor out of the box and we've done this test probably 30 or 40 times you just take a carburetor out of the box and stick it on it works pretty well you don't have to worry about changing like oh no i have to change the jets by three jet numbers or whatever now you can do that and it's really good to do that on a chassis dyno you can also do that out on the street with an air fuel meter because there are a lot of good like stand-alone airfield meters go out and find out how it works and you know fine-tune the idle in the transition circuit and all that stuff and you can really get it to make good make it work well on your combination but actually right out of the box they seem to work pretty well so on this test comparing our really high dollar ultra xp to our low buck brawler this was a good test so we ran a 351 windsor this started out long long ago as a 351 windsor crate motor from ford racing it was originally like a 385 horsepower motor but we had made some changes to it over the years a matter of fact it sat for i'm sure six or seven years before before we finally used it again it had been so long that we didn't even really know what the camshaft was anymore because there weren't there weren't any notes on it so all we know is it had about 575 lifts so judging by this power output and the rest of the combination i'm assuming that it's going to be comparable to that extreme energy 274 cam maybe one step above that but we did measure the the valve lift which is was easy to do but the rest of the motor had also been changed that combination originally came with a ford racing head but it had since been changed to the holly system x heads which i don't think are available anymore it also had a dual plane rpm air gap and it had inch and three-quarter headers and msd distributor kind of typical of the way that we would run it so run first with the brawler and this is a 750 brawler carburetor with mechanical secondaries because they're available as we went over with a bunch of different configurations but this was a mechanical secondary it had air bleeds and stuff in it but we didn't change any of that stuff what we did was set it up with jetting and we and we ran the same jetting in both of the carburetors and we've got some interesting stuff to talk about there too so run in this configuration obviously we optimize the timing and on this 351 it ran best at 35 degrees of total timing with the brawler carburetor the combination made 410.8 horsepower so we'll call that 411 and made 421 foot pounds of torque so here's what happened after we installed the you know double throw down ultra super light whiz-bang ultra xp carburetor and we actually did see a slight gain in power now it was not a lot it went up to 418 horsepower so you're talking about a difference of seven horsepower it was a little bit better but i have to also point out the fact that when we ran the brawler carburetor and this carburetor we ran the same jet split on these things and with the brawler carburetor it was slightly richer than it was with the xp unfortunately i didn't have a whole bunch of time to dial in the carburetors but know that it was about three tenths of an air fuel point richer with the brawler carburetor than it was with the ultra xp so if anything we might be able to tune a little bit more power out of the brawler combination and bring it a little closer to the xp but the point of all this is is that the brawler carburetor works very well it's it's low buck i mean if we look at some comparisons here we see that the difference in power there of seven horsepower at 418 horsepower is a difference in power of roughly 1.6 so the difference in price the brawler is well the xp is more than a hundred percent costs 104 more than the brawler does so for a hundred percent more than a hundred percent more money you have a power difference of one point six percent so you guys have to decide if that's worth it in my opinion it's not because for a street type combination for this 400 450 even up to maybe 500 horsepower i probably would pick the brawler carburetor it's a lot less money it works within 1.6 of the power output of the more expensive carburetor now if i was putting together a track car and i wanted to make a lot of power and i was going for every last bit that ultra xp really is nice and it's really hard to beat the other thing to think about is it's very lightweight compared to their older carburetors i mean it drops weight quite a bit so as we know less weight is the same as more horsepower so it definitely does its job and it will make a little more and it will make more power and probably as we go up in power the ultra xp would be getting would begin to show itself even more but it this kind of power level that brawler car breed car the brawler card sorry about that is really hard to beat okay guys what do you think about our low buck carb comparison in all honesty obviously i'm a junkyard guy so i like this kind of stuff now don't get me wrong the ultra xp would definitely be my go-to choice if i was building some kind of race motor i wanted every last bit of horsepower out of it it's a cool carburetor it's lightweight it has a lot of a lot of tricks and a lot of versatility and it works well for really cool race applications but if you're doing a street car that brawler carburetor is going to be hard to beat i mean it's like within this much power of the double throw down piece and it's this far away in price it's less than half the price of the ultra xp and it works very well it's tunable it responded to jetting it did all the things that you'd want of a carburetor it has a full race high speed air blades adjustment it has side plugs it has a lot of cool features on it for such a low cost as a matter of fact when i first did the test and we were telling everybody how great this carburetor was i think that holly even raised the price on them because they became so popular but that's part of what happens when we do the test and tell everybody how great it is so make sure when you're watching this video don't tell anybody else because then holly might raise the price again armature holder guys thanks for watching make sure to like share subscribe let me know if you want to see more low buck versus high buck testing coming up

Channel: Richard Holdener

Views: 129,124

Keywords: BRAWLER, ULTRA XP, CARB, 750, HOLLEY, DYNO TEST, 351W

Id: dNwfbQA-d4U

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020