A little more oomph

If this is what you think, then you should tell everyone to run a Quadrajet. Because it is by far the most tunable carb out there. It’s not even close. You can buy something like 110 or more secondary metering rods just to dial in the tune up. The problem is, after all that they are overly complicated and they won’t make 1 hp more than a Holley that is correctly tuned. The QJ suffers from the same thing that every other non Holley carb does. It’s float bowls are too small. Ditto the needle and seats. You can’t pass enough fuel to make a lot of power with them, and on top of that the single inlet is a limit. The fuel bowls sit right over the hot intake manifold, heating the fuel which is a power loss. And the fuel bowl is way too small. The floats hang the wrong way and they shut off fuel with acceleration. Using a QJ on a single plane intake poses incredible distribution issues because as the secondaries open, no matter how smoothly you dump all that air and fuel into an already chaotic plenum. There are more issues but those alone are enough to rule it out as a performance carb. Can you make them make power? Certainly. But they won’t make more power than a Holley, and as the power level goes up, the QJ falls behind very quickly. The Carter/Brock suffers from many of the same issues. We at least need to be intellectually honest when comparing carbs. They all have their limits. The Holley is simple, easy to tune, has huge float bowls that have 360 degrees of air circulation around them. They have a needle and seat for the primary and secondary bowls, and the sizes of needle and seats is quite impressive. You can calibrate a Holley to run on E85 or methanol. Air flow capability is for the Holley is second to none. Of course, this isn’t a defense of the Holley carb, but rather a short run down of features of a couple of carbs as a comparison. When performance matters there is no comparable carb to the Holley although many have tried.

Thank you for the breakdown! I have had issues with fuel percolation. But have had less issue since running a small spacer and header wrap on my fuel line. Considering going electric fuel pump at some point.