I've seen a product called carb cleaner. My car is a 225 with a Holley 1920. Does carb cleaner do any good or is it a waste of money?

_________________
AIM-DusterDude1973

Are you talking about the stuff you dump in your gas tank?

What sort of problems are you experiencing that you are trying to fix?

yes

low gas mileage is my main problem. The car sat for several years and the carb hasn't been rebuilt or cleaned so I was hoping that i might be able to clean it a little bit(or a lot) with this stuff.

_________________
AIM-DusterDude1973

I hope your using fresh gas and not the stuff that sat in the tank for several years. Gas will get sticky with age and do a number on the valve train.

I doubt carb cleaner will do much for you. If anything it sounds like you can benefit from a carb rebuild.

About the cleaner... get the chevron brand if you want to use it. Its expensive compared to the others but works the best I hear. Maybe also labeld fuel system cleaner.

Hi Dude, A good "top end" cleaner will indeed help your car. The product you are looking for will say "removes carbon from valves and cylinder heads", or language similar. Amsoil makes a product they call Power Foam, which you spray into the carb as it idles. You will need to raise the rpms to keep the engine from dying while you are spraying it in. Then promtly drive the car keeping the engine in 2nd gear to keep the engine rpms up. Sometimes a large peice of carbon can break loose and get stuck in the valve opening. It will break up and pass through if you keep driving, and keep the rpms up. When you first spray in the Power Foam, all kinds of black crap wil come out of the tail pipe. Make sure the wind isn;t blowing towards your neighbors house. This product may be hard to find these days, as the use of it will kill a catalytic converter. It just throws too much junk into it at once. If you cannot find Power Foam, read the labels on other products and try to get the best thing you can find. BG makes a good top end cleaner. It is pricey, but gets good endorsements from its users.

After that do a thorough tune up on the ignition. Put in new wires and plugs, and check for voltage drop in the primary wires. Every blue wire under the hood of your car should be showing close to 13.5 volts on a VOM. If it doesn't, check out the voltage regulator, the battery, the altenator, and all of the connectors in the path of the blue wire. The brown wire from the low side of the ballast resister should read about 8 volts to the coil. A one volt drop from the battery to the high side of the ballast resister is MAXIMUM drop allowed. Good wiring will show virtually no drop.

Problems here really raise hell with the effectiveness of the Mopar electronic ignition system. It is very common on old Mopars to see high resistance in this circuit which will effect your gas mileage. Sometimes just replacing the connectors will fix things. I have replaced every old wire in the ignition of my old Mopars. On the slant car, I bypassed the old ameter, and installed a volt meter. The problem with the ameter is that it is in series with the charging circuit wiring. A bad one can really drop the voltage to the ignition, and thus interfere with the effectiveness of the ignition. Fresh wiring is one reason my 360 Dart gets 16 to 22 MPG and my slant Dart gets 22 to 29 MPG. You don;t have to live with the crusty old wiring in these old cars. Replacing it is an easy project that yields very high returns. INew wiring is not exotic, but very useful. Have fun with your slant.

Would I have to replace the whole harness to lose the resistance? If so, would the engine harnesses here ( http://evanswiring.tripod.com/evanswiri ... s/id3.html ) be the right thing to replace?

And what all wires does the engine harness contain? Has anyone ordered harnesses from Evans Wiring? How are the products?

_________________
AIM-DusterDude1973

The carburator cleaner I used was in a little bottle and you squirt it inside your carb and the car revs up and shot out a whole lot of white smoke.

I checked out the web site, and it looks like an excellent source for replacement wiring for all old Mopars. The engine harness will replace most of the ignition wiring, but there will still be a few conections inside the car, under the dash. Before you buy anything though, put a VOM on the conncetions and see if there is a voltage drop anywhere. See if the blue wire on the ballast resister is at 13.5 volts. I would like to know what you find. Measure your battery at idle, and then the blue wire on the ballast resister at idle. They should be nearly the same.