Jolly Green said:

Most carb guys I know say Edelbrock is more 'set it and forget it' than Holley. A Holley will perform very well, but requires more frequent tweaking, where the Eddie stays put once it's tuned. I know I ran a Holley on a 302 Bronco years ago that needed regular attention.

As for ethanol: I hate it mixed in with our gas. The mileage goes down, and the stuff eat all the rubber parts in your truck. With yours being set up to run it from the start, though, you probably didn't have all the trouble it causes for older trucks running gas.

Click to expand...

I don't know remember what class it was when I was in college that we did this study.

But ethanol can ruin gas mileage from 10% or worse for every 10% of Ethanol added to gas...and it's worse for older cars and colder weather because they weren't designed to handle it. (Numbers might not be 100% accurate but close)

I have always heard the same about holley and edelbrock. Most carb guys I have gotten to help me with my truck always said that Holley was better but requires more attention than eddelbrok but both are good.

Got up early this morning before the kids were awake and went out and pulled the other head off. Nice to have things taken apart and now to clean and get ready for the new stuff. I'm hoping to have everything back together by spring time and ready to run.

Well I decided to go with an Edelbrock Carb and placed the order. And I was able to get another guy who does some mud racing and his motor is going to have 12:1 compression, but in the class he is running requires pump gas, so he is going to buy my E85 Carb in order to be legal for the class. So all in all, everything is coming out to be a pretty straight up deal. Plus, through summit I was able to get free shipping, a $75 dollar Edelbrock Jacket and a $30 free edelbrock air cleaner. So I'm pretty stoked about the deal. Now to get things together when it all arrives and see how everything works. I won't make too much progress for awhile, but I'll report back when things are ready. Now to start syphoning the fuel tank since I have an almost full tank of Ethanol.

Thanks for the opinions on the carbs.

Made some progress. My brother who helped me build the motor came up last weekend and helped me get everything together. But, what should have taken a couple hours took 2 days. The heads, push rods, rocker arms and intake went on just fine. The problem came with my ignition/distributor. Way back when, I started to have problems with air/fuel mixture and from what I thought was timing and I had to keep tuning and really could never get things where the truck was running great, but could never really track anything down to solve the problem. Anyway, my brother was messing around with the DUI distributor that I was running and just decided to take the rotor off and look (just for the hell of it) and to our surprise there were two spot welds that broke which in turn made a mess of the shaft and advance springs. Needless to say, my distributor was crap. The gear also was wearing a bit. So, we spot welding things back together and fixed that and we wanted to replaced the drive gear, but no one had any in stock so we were just going to put the DUI back in and see how things ran and then I'd replace the gear on a later day. The engine started up pretty well and ran, but the spark coming from the DUI wasn't very good, but it ran. Then came the 2nd problem. With the new heads, for some reason the DUI was fitting tight with the water neck that had been previously ground down for the DUI to fit, but once again but hitting the water neck. So, we then tried to file a bit more off the water neck which was already thin pot metal and what do you know, we filed too much making a hole in the water neck. Luckily, I had an extra brand new one. By this time, it was getting late in the day and so we decided to call it a day. The next day, my brother was second guessing the DUI and didn't want to use it since it was causing alot of issues, so we decided to try and track down a FORD distributor and go that route. We spend a hour or so at a junkyard and found a decent used one and a coil. Later, I decided to call around to see if a local parts store had a rebuilt distributor and they did. No one had a replacement drive gear, but they had a distributor. So, I decided to get a new one, but keep the used one just in case. I called around to see if anyone had an MSD ignition box (cuz we were gonig to rig up the DUI module to work) and O'reilly's said they had one in stock. So we drove 20 miles to pick it up. Got there, and all picked up the MSD box, but when I picked it off the shelf, the box was empty and they didn't have one. Why in the hell would they put an empty box on the shelf and not have the part. Anyway, the guy at O'reilly's was kind enough to make some calls to track one down, but no one had any. So, in the end I ended up getting a MSD Street fire ignition box. It's more of a budget one compared to the MSD 6AL one, but it worked just fine. After we got everything wired up, the truck started and ran great. The spark produced was much more than the DUI did. Sometimes trying to upgrade things and trying to be more simple just causes more problems than just sticking to what works. Yeah, now I have more wires and crap under the hood, but no big deal. As long as things work, I'm happy. So if anyone is ever looking at going with a DUI or HEI instead of FORD, I'd rethink those plans and just stick with what has been proven to work.

Good information, Buck. Thank You. You have just reaffirmed my decision to stay with the FORD unit.

X2 on that Buck, part of my issue was putting a GM piece on!

With all due respect Buck,I had no prolblem changing over to an HEI Ign,Distributor,Removed the ignition box & unplugged the wiring harness from it & removed it.one wire hookup makes things look neat. a little care full grinding & filing on the goose neck & distributor base gave me plenty of clearance.works great.I to thought about the GM Part being on a Ford,but i always did prefer the HEI ignition over the Duraspark cause of the ignition boxes.it comes down to a matter of what you prefer or want

BuzzGun79 said:

With all due respect Buck,I had no prolblem changing over to an HEI Ign,Distributor,Removed the ignition box & unplugged the wiring harness from it & removed it.one wire hookup makes things look neat. a little care full grinding & filing on the goose neck & distributor base gave me plenty of clearance.works great.I to thought about the GM Part being on a Ford,but i always did prefer the HEI ignition over the Duraspark cause of the ignition boxes.it comes down to a matter of what you prefer or want

Click to expand...

I too heard good things about the HEI setup and I did like the simplicity about it and how much cleaner the engine compartment looked with the setup. I just had a lot of frustration with my DUI distributor and didn't expect any problems with it after just 1500 miles on it.