Holley sniper failure, this time its all bad.

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Cope

Cope

Fusing with fire
Joined
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This is the second sniper unit to fail on me in 3 months.
First one started pouring fuel out the main body. The car was scheduled to be in pebble beach in 5 days. Holley overnighted me a new one. All good.

Today im driving the same car and it seems to be out of gas, stumbling surging.... im about a mile and a half from the shop so i nurse it back. Pull the air cleaner off and hit the key.

It is SHOOTING fuel out of the rear driver side injector at full throttle rate. I mean a stuck wide open kind of rate. Drain the oil and cut the filter. Now this is a new engine. I just did the 500 mile oil change like 2 weeks ago.
Cut open the oip filter open and "oh no.." we got problems......

Fuel tank is new, all lines are new, holley pre and post filter as well and their pump in a new tank.....

Holley says they will fix the sniper but what about the engine? At this point im not even sure i want their system to go back on....Man this is all bad. I may be eating the cost to rebuild a customers engine due to their system failure....

We taking a lot of my time and money to make this right...

I just don't know what to do...

Right now im sitting down drinking beer and petting the dog... if crying would help, I'd be doing that to.....
 
Second unit would be going back. Right through their front window.
 
Trust me, nothing would make me happier that to loose my **** at this point but im gonna keep it together for now...

This is a 100,000 dollar car and my most important client so i will take care of it but how much of this i end up eating is up in the air..

Its not gonna cause me to close the doors but it sure will put a bind on things. Im just one guy so every day i work for free, i dont make money. I need to be working on paying jobs not paying out..
 
what was in the filter? If the oil thinned, perhaps it didnt do any damage as you only had it running a low RPM for what maybe 5-6 minutes? The injectors usually fire when grounded, so if you had a grounded harness, it could possibly cause the injector to go open. Seems the Sniper should have a fail safe if it sees the rail pressure drop with an RPM (NONE) mismatch..Dont know how smart they are but that's a safety feature from high pressure pump EFI day 1: no CPS RPM detected, no fuel pump relay power after 2-3 seconds.
 
Funny ( but not laughing) I installed a Fuel injection system on a small block for a $50k resto mod going thru my shop.
It wont hold the tune and FI Tech seems to not care since its paid for. What little help I get has been like I was asking the Queen for part of her sandwich.
I was looking to the Holley as a replacement because the client wants the car now and it does not start right and all is with in specs.
I feel your pain brother.
Chin up and it can only get better!
 
Cope said:
Trust me, nothing would make me happier that to loose my **** at this point but im gonna keep it together for now...

This is a 100,000 dollar car and my most important client so i will take care of it but how much of this i end up eating is up in the air..

Its not gonna cause me to close the doors but it sure will put a bind on things. Im just one guy so every day i work for free, i dont make money. I need to be working on paying jobs not paying out..
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I may not be at your level, but im a one man show too,in a single bay trying to scrape out a living. So when stuff goes bad someone needs to take responsibility.
shop rate went up today,and i just picked up a customer that
Owns a handful of classic cars, all hot-rodded. Except for the last one,a t-bird convertible. All redone.

Had a routing issue with a new shift cable install, it moved and burned. Out of my pocket,and old one will hang on the wall as a reminder.

My supplier will step up and get labour when the fault was a bad part out of the gate.
Holley needs to address this,as there is clearly an issue with their product.
 
I do have the "wall of shame" its all hand fab metal work that didn't work out. To nice to throw away but it hangs on the wall as a reminder to not do that again...

What was in the filter?

Metal.....and some black stuff...

Gonna run a compression test and a leak down in the morning and see jist how bad it is....

I got the oil out and left the drain pulg out so hopefully all the fuel will evaporate over night...

Those folks that know me will know this car has been a blessing and a curse. I just cant ever seem to get it right...

It dose win first place in every show it go to so thats great and it has opened many doors for me but it also costs me a lot of my time that i dont bill for......
 
Well good luck with it. I would be trying to talk the customer into some kind of nice carburetor.
 
OEM stuff is boring reliable, why cant Holley (an OEM TBI supplier for years) get its adapted systems right? Pages of rants, most are probably newb install issues, but its not that hard to connect a few parts and an idiot proof keyed harness to a sealed ECU....so that makes at least a percentage of these hardware/firmware issues.
 
pishta said:
OEM stuff is boring reliable, why cant Holley (an OEM TBI supplier for years) get its adapted systems right? Pages of rants, most are probably newb install issues, but its not that hard to connect a few parts and an idiot proof keyed harness to a sealed ECU....so that makes at least a percentage of these hardware/firmware issues.
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"OEM stuff is boring reliable" No, it's not.
 
Sure it is. my 186,000 mile SC400 is boring..gas, oil, filters and tires..still has its original O2 sensors! As a parts guy, you see all the bad. But there is a huge percentage out there that never have an issue. Like my biz as a repairman, I see every problem, but I meet people that haven't had a phone man out in 25 years.
 
A few years back my friend built a 40 Merc with a 540 twin blowers and Holley FI and he had a 4 speed Lenco, and every time he would shift gears it would back fire and blow the belt off. I worked for Cadillac for ten years and I know how fuel injection works, that said, I kept telling him the set up would not work because it only uses a TPS and MAP for fuel delivery. He said Holley said it will work and they have thousand out there to prove it. The problem is with his set up he will be cruising at 3000 RPM and grab the next gear and put a load on the motor without giving it more fuel IE stepping on the gas pedal, so it leans out and back fires and that brakes the blower belt. It needs a mass air flow sensor to work and nobody uses one, if the did the systems would work great.

Oh yea just to add he trashed the FI and bought 2 Holley 650's and it runs like a champ,
 
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pishta said:
Sure it is. my 186,000 mile SC400 is boring..gas, oil, filters and tires..still has its original O2 sensors! As a parts guy, you see all the bad. But there is a huge percentage out there that never have an issue. Like my biz as a repairman, I see every problem, but I meet people that haven't had a phone man out in 25 years.
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You're right.....and usually the "all bad" people bring on themselves by not maintaining properly. Cheapest crap gas they can find, driving forever with MIL on and on and on.....but as BOTH a mechanic and parts guy that's all I've seen is the bad so.......


And agree or not, this is my opinion. These cars were not designed as EFI cars. No R&D in that area at all. IMO, people are putting systems on these old girls that really "doesn't belong".

And I know what I'm gonna get. "You don't know EFI, you're scared of it" Well, I was working on EFI probably before a lot of you even knew what it was. I've seen it come into vogue. I've seen enough EFI and its problems to stay away from it.

But I will agree with you on one thing. You're dead right. The factories got it WAY MORE RIGHT than the aftermarket. THAT MUCH is for sure.
 
Cope is it possible the regulator/ pump is going nuts and creating way too much pressure at times?
 
I hope you are able to resolve it without putting in a lot more cash from your own pocket, losing time is one thing, but losing time and being out of pocket really sucks.
 
Cope said:
This is the second sniper unit to fail on me in 3 months.
We taking a lot of my time and money to make this right...
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Who chose the Sniper? You or the customer? If the customer said, "Let's use a Sniper", then I'd say they're on the hook for the rework if Holley doesn't help.
 
I have a question. How would the bad sniper cause damage to the internals of the engine? You said there was metal in the oil how would that be caused by the injection? Maybe it was like that before the sniper? I know you said this is your biggest customer and you want to do right by him but I'm not convinced whatever happened inside the engine was your or holleys fault.
 
Raw (liquid) fuel running through an engine is VERY bad. It removes the oil from the bearings, now your metal on metal.

The gas "washes out" the oil on the rings and destroys the buffer between the mains, rods and caps.

Its a all bad situation when raw gas gets pumped into a running engine.

I recommend the sniper system. In my opinion it was a better choice than FI tech. Customer wanted Fuel injection that "looks like a carb" so Holley or Fi tech basically.

Over pressure should cause a lean condition, the injector cant open. Most likely its a chunk of crap in the injector or a ground fault in the board. (10 to 1 holley says crap in the system but this is a new system, flushed before hooked up and running their filters.
 
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Efi can be trouble free for 300,00 kilometers. Have seen it.
I think the name on my throttle body is holley. So dependability is there.
Perhaps sniper comes from the chinese division?
Im not big on the high horsepower fuel injection,but on mildly built engines they are nice.
When efi hit the street in the mid 80’s a lot of mechanics walked away. I know of 3 that left after seeing the service manuals.
 
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