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Carburator Help!!!

SIIKBRONCO

New Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2010
Messages
45
Hello everyone. Well i just bought my 73 Bronco a couple weeks ago and its having serious carb issues. My mechanic says that it looks like its been sitting a while and there is some corrosion inside. He has tried to rebuild it, trouble shoot it and it runs like crap so the concensis is that 2 mechanics recommend a new carb. Right now it is a Edelbrock 8867 with manual choke. My Bronco has a 302, headers, basically stock. What would you recommend i buy? Any help is appreciated and i am not a very mechanically inclined person.
 

DirtDonk

Contributor
Bronco Guru
Joined
Nov 3, 2003
Messages
47,353
Surprised it's so corroded that they couldn't at least get it running better. Did they dip it first, or were they only putting new parts in it?
Shame to waste a good carb, but if it's indeed that far gone, I guess you do have to break down and get a new one.

What are your intentions for the Bronco? Daily Driver? Off-road only? Little of both?
Where do you live? High altitude or low? That kind of stuff.
I like the Edelbrocks for their ease of tweaking, but they tend to need more help than most in the off-road angles.
For the most aftermarket tweak parts, Holley's have it. You can also get one of the smaller carbs from Holley now. The Truck Avenger 470 seems a good choice for a stock to mild 302.
Seems the happiest carb owners for both are the Quadrajet owners, but you have to do more work to make one work on a Bronco.
See? Simple decision, huh?

Maybe a Holley TA 470 as a good middle-of-the-road choice?
Just keep the size between 450 and 600 though. A 650 would work, but is more oversizezd than you need and would lose some theoretical efficiency at that point. The Edelbrock (Carter type) is more forgiving of oversizing, and the Quadrajets don't fall into that category. They use other design features to work on smaller engines.

Maybe some of the TA owners will chime in.

Paul
 

broncnaz

Bronco Guru
Joined
May 22, 2003
Messages
24,341
You probably have a edelbrock 1405 the actual number is stamped on the pass side of the base plate.
What is runs like crap? what exactly is it doing? 1405's are jetted way rich from the facotry 1406's are a little leaner but I still had to jet a 1406 down quite a bit to get where it needed to be for a slightly warmed up 302. So most of your issues may be its just to rich. There are tuning kits availible that even not very mechanically inclined people can rejet there own carb. Basically if you own a carb you need to know how to work on it. Same goes for owning a bronco IMO.
As was said edelbrocks pretty much suck offroad. They will do modest trails fine but get into anything steep and they plain suck. There are some mods that can be done to them to make them run but I have yet to try them out for myself.
I'm partial to Holley carbs myself the 470 is a good choice but any standard 600cfm carb will work and will be cheaper than the TA. But again any aftermarket carb you get really needs to be tuned to get the best perfromance out of them.
 
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