[Tommy]

I'm old enough to have driven many miles in daily drivers with mechanical fuel pumps. I don't recall ever having one fail. That said, I went with an electric fuel pump in my Cobra for two reasons. First, when the weather gets cold, it may sit for a month or more between starts. I like knowing the float bowl is full before I press the start button so I don't work the starter and spin a dry engine too much. Second, my engine has a racing modified carburetor with no choke system. It needs a full shot of fuel to compensate for the large volume of cold air at start.

My electric pump is noisy, but then so is everything else in this car. The Red Holley has an internal fuel pressure relief valve that limits the flow of fuel to the carburetor by redirecting some of the pumped fuel back to the intake side of the pump. That means when the engine is not demanding a lot of fuel, the pump is repumping the same fuel over and over. So, instead of taking heat from the pump away to the engine, the fuel will allow the pump to run hotter. Putting a fuel pressure regulator (with a return line to the tank) downstream from the pump will solve that problem and likely allow the pump to last longer. If you do that you'll either need to use a pump without an internal pressure regulator or one that allows a pressure setting higher than the one on the external fuel pressure regulator.