Another "Is Fuel Injection a Worthwhile Upgrade?" Question
I've seen most of the conversation is about two things: Performance and Drivability. How about a 3rd dimension.... reliability.
I have always felt more confident in roadside or small town fixes with carbs. Let's say, you had to take your kids, grandkids, or whatever on a 8,000 mile round trip from Texas to Alaska and back in late fall where it will be freezing at nights.... and much travel will be in remote areas with little help. Would you prefer, per say, a 600 eddy or Holley with a mechanical fuel pump or Sniper EFI under the hood of your classic?
I drive my classics across many states, dodging big cities as much as possible. I love being out where the coyote's howl and sage brush rolls. I personally feel better with the simplicity of a carb and mechanical fuel pump. I can throw a few dollars worth of a few things and be gone. Pliers, screw driver, and about 3 wrenches and I can remove and replace just about everything you can see under the hood.
I mean if that's what you're comfortable with, go for it. Each individual EFI part outside the ECU in anything we are talking about is a brutally simple device, there are just more of them (think of injectors or individual coils as redundancy, lose 1 cyl vs all) vs the carb being full of tiny orifices that are sensitive to dirt, gaskets that can leak, seals that break down in ethanol gas, distributor caps cracking, I mean you could come up with all kinds of failure modes, most of us have seen them also. I literally don't even have a cap and rotor anymore, so that failure point is completely gone. Generally EFI tends to eliminate "wear" parts or things that are sensitive to dirt.
The EFI parts, short of the ECU or the crank sensor taking a dump and you not being able to get one, you'll get home for sure. Of course there's almost an unending amount of ways you could integrate an EFI system at this point so, you can make it as high or low tech as you choose. Fuel pumps, you can get those at part stores. Drop the tank or put a hatch in the floor if you want.
The crank sensor is basically the same thing as the magnetic pickup in an electronic ignition distributor, I don't think that's a terribly failure prone part.
I drove a 158k miles, 15 year old factory EFI car from the 80s all over the place and never had to work on it at all. Many of the sensors I'm using on the Duster are the same design sensors that were on that car also. Even stuff like Holley usually has GM sensors.
A fuel injector is basically a solenoid to begin with, usually they don't just up and die. It has the ability to compensate for underperforming parts. Also something like an MPFI system you could literally test each individual part (and the individual coils) on the side of the road and read all the sensors.
Let's see for the price of two brand new Street Demon carburetors $600 on sale, the entire fuel side of my nitrous... $100 tank $200 + lines $150 fuel pump $50 pressure gauge $35 filter $35 low pressure switch..
Wouldn't need a window switch $55 timing retard $169 electric fan heat control $45... 2 step launch control can't remember how much...
Wideband O2 sensor $169...
Don't have a control for the AC idle switch and would have that.. certainly can't completely program all this stuff without a lot of hand work.. Jets metering rods springs for the carburetor and changing springs and stops in the distributor..
I'm assuming I can get like a stock Magnum distributor and I'm not sure about the ignition box?
If I could sell all that crap above for half the price I would be 3/4 of the way there...
The stock magnum distributor is literally a camshaft sensor and only has 1 on/off switch. You would want a Lean-Burn or a TBI distributor (your choice), or you could literally just lock a regular electronic one. The magnum one has to be run with a crank trigger, the trucks have an 8 point (or 6 for the V6) in the flywheel/flexplate and in my case I have a 36-1 ford style wheel on the crank pulley. Then the cam sensor (distributor) just tells the engine which phase the engine is in to run in sequential mode.