Holley Carburetor Rebuild








This past Winter/Spring I acquired a 1974 Datsun 260z that the previous owner was a war veteran and finally gave the O.K to his brother-in-law to go ahead and sell his project. When I purchased the car it came with the hood chopped and a 600CFM Holley Carburetor sticking out the roof. I had the HARDEST time to get the car started without a choke butterfly with the cold Wisconsin weather. To remedy this I purchased a super cheap carburetor off ebay, Holley 600CFM List No. 1850-3, to steal the choke butterfly off of it and put it on the existing carburetor. The carburetor that I purchased can be seen in the top photograph. 

After hours of trying to get the car to start with the newly installed choke butterfly, I finally decided to purchase a rebuild kit from Oreilly's and rebuild, clean and polish the Datsun's carburetor. What I believe was happening, judging by the wet plugs, was that the larger carb was flooding the engine making it impossible to start.

So I gave up, until I found an article online where a Datsun was running the same set up, but instead of the 600 cfm carburetor, a 370 cfm carburetor took its place. Everything I had read on the interwebs said, 600cfm is way to big for a Datsun unless major work has been done to the engine(oversized cam, bored out, etc.). So sadly these carburetors are going to waste on my Datsun project, but looking on the bright side I did learn a lot about how a carburetor works and am confident to do future maintenance on my 370CFM Holley carburetor on the Datsun now.

And did I mention that it runs now? See this is a perfect example of hard work paying off.

All in all, a very successful learning experience.


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