Weber Conversion Project

[seattlestiva]

Check out recarb.com.au/ for a swap over Festiva Weber set-up. Expensive

[KingFish]

I was wondering if you could tell us the part number for the adapter plate you used?

[bravekozak]

There was a post where the member had two bosses built up with welding on the aluminum intake manifold. You would have a lot more hood clearance, it would easier to mount the carb since there is no need to mount an adapter first, as well as having better geometry for the throttle pull.

[MasterTec]

UPDATE: I ended up making new, thicker carb gaskets as the paper thin ones supplied with the kit weren't cutting it. Now it idles great!

I cleaned up the vacuum hoses quite a bit and I drilled out the EVAP port on the carb and hooked that up. I now have the Valve Cover vent hose hooked up to the air cleaner and the EVAP hose hooked up to the carb.

I also ended up changing the vacuum around at the distributor advance. IIRC I had manifold vacuum at the top port and ported at the bottom (I might have this backwards though) but I noticed that at idle a high pitched whine was emitted from the advance. If I removed the ported vacuum line the whine would persist unless I plugged off that bottom port so that's what I did. Now I only have manifold vacuum installed at the top port. I think there may be a blown diaphragm in there somewhere and I'm keeping my eyes open for a replacement advance but this seems to be working well for the time being.

Now she's running pretty dang well! Once warmed up it runs and idles great! When cold it starts right up and idles higher (like it should when cold). My only issue is that it seems like the choke is opening too soon. There is a short period of time between the choke opening and the engine being warmed up during which it does not want to idle well - where I have to feather the gas to keep it from stalling at idle. Luckily this only happens if I get stuck at the red light before getting on the highway during my morning commute! I'm sure this is just about tinkering with the adjustments a bit.

I'm also not real impressed with the fuel economy. I've deliberately gone through two tanks now without making any adjustments and I'm getting about 32-33mpg. Now, before the factory carb was starting to act up I was seeing about 42-43mpg and after it was acting up I still saw 35mpg or so. It's not the end of the world as I know that an increase in performance usually means an decrease in economy but I would like to tinker around and try to get that figure up closer to 40. I think smaller idle jets will still help with that.

I pulled my plugs as I've only had the car for about 18 months and I don't know when my dad (who had the car before me) replaced them last. Anyway they didn't look too bad but did have a white coating to them - like it was running lean. I cleaned them up and re-gapped them but didn't really change anything about how the car runs. I suspect that some of that could be from before I even installed the Weber. I noticed that a couple vacuum lines were reversed at the EGR amplifier and there was no way the EGR was working the way things were installed.

I'll post some new pictures soon!