[StanJ]

Steve, I understand what Pat is saying. It isn't so much that any particular change is impossible...just that changing some very important things...such as decreasing the cross-sectional area of some tapered passages in the metering block main wells for example...is more work than a significant percentage of customers are willing to pay for. Yeah, it can be done...even the booster issue is pretty straightforward to solve (there are a couple of ways to handle it; the more "involved" of the two allows one to swap any 4150 Holley-based booster into a race Demon at will). The difference in performance from these (and subsequent) changes can be pretty dramatic in some applications, but we're talking about an extra $1500 worth of work here over-and-above whatever else needed to be done. A select few "street" guys can handle that; most can't...if they could, they'd have likely gone the EFI route to begin with.

Having said all this, the Demon carburetor isn't a bad basic design; in fact, in stock form it offers several advantages over a Holley HP of comparable size. The "problems" with the Demon line are the same ones that Holley faces: covering a practically unlimited number of applications with a manageable number of products means that no product can be "razors edge" perfect for any one application, and -- as with any business -- production costs increase exponentially the closer you get to building large numbers of anything absolutely right. I know Barry Grant personally, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that he will not offer any product or service unless it is profitable for his company to do so...and I do not say that in criticism.

In addition to around 150 Holley carbs, we prepared 22 Demons for a variety of racing and road applications in 2005 and will do even more of them this year. If the market continues to grow, I'll look at building components for them (such as billet boosters and redesigned metering blocks) that address these shortcomings.

Stan Justus
Stallion Racing Components