Lippy's ERA #797 build log

[lippy]

Funny to see this post resurrected. The car has about 2400 miles on it. Not bad for the first 9 months or so. I've taken the car on a couple of longer trips, but most of the mileage has been local tuning runs with a wideband O2 sensor attached.

Because it has a fairly radical cam, getting the car to run just right has proven to be a little tricky, but I think I'm finally there. First, I swapped out carbs and bought a Braswell. It is a top-notch piece, beautiful construction and tolerances. And it is not a modified Holley. It is manufactured 100% by Braswell. Not that the original QFT couldn't have been made to work well, but the Braswell comes with advice from Dave Braswell himself, and I can tell you first hand this guy is insanely knowledgable about carbs and engines (most of his carbs are on NHRA cars churning out 10k HP). One feature of this carb is that you set the floats precisely using a caliper instead of eyeballing the sight glass. For example, we settled on 0.825" for the primary, and 0.775" for the secondary (higher). You would think these small differences of less than a tenth wouldn't make a difference, but they really do. With these settings, my cruise is lean enough, and I don't starve the secondary under hard launch. After a couple of iterations of fiddling with idle air bleeds, jets, float levels, and squirters, I'm where I need to be on AFR during cruise, light acceleration, and WOT.

The second thing I did that really made a difference was to get a 10 degree advance bushing from FBO Ignition, Distributor tuning and Carburetion Professionals, FBO Ignition systems, Ford Ignition, Mopar Ignition, Ford Distributors, Mopar Distributors, Ford distributor curving, Mopar distributor curving, HEI Ignition, MSD ignition tuning,. The reason I needed it was that I was fouling plugs at idle. Dave Braswell and Don at 4secondsflat advised me that with my cam, I need a lot more idle advance (say 26 degrees) while keeping my full advance at 36. Since the cam has a lot of overlap, it has a hard time building cylinder pressure at low RPM and it doesn't atomize or burn fuel well at idle. The trade off many times is hard starting with that much initial advance, but it actually starts easier and runs much better. With the carb adjustments I made, that really did the trick and my plugs look great. In fact, I cut a few of them last week so I could see the color along the entire insulator.

Certainly I wish it would've been a bit easier to get this car running right, but the flip side is that I really learned a ton.