Despite the rather huge engine bay of the Caprice, there wasn't many good places to mount the coil, so we chose a nice flat surface up by the windshield wiper motor. It made for a short coil wire and easy access.

While Tony made a run for some fasteners to secure the coil, I went ahead and ran a new set of Autolite plugs into the engine. Why Autolite plugs? They were the cheapest ones at the parts store. I am also really good at planking apparently. I got into that fad about two years late.

I can't say that I have any idea what the hell Tony is doing in this photo, other than getting his shoes greasy standing on the engine.

Here you can see the location of the coil, the new distributor installed, and us just about done running the spark plug wires. Trying to find the best route around all the vacuum hoses and junk was tedious.

Our reward for this work was 11hp at the wheels at peak HP and some major gains under the curve. We did not change the centrifugal springs or advance bushing in the distributor and ran it as it sat out of the box. All pulls for the remainder of the day were made this way. The engine liked the hotter spark, more total timing, and more favorable curve provided by the MSD distributor. The 6AL-2 box was great as we were able to use the dip switches to set the rev-limiter to 5,000 RPM and not worry about over running the engine on the pulls. The driveshaft stayed in and we were onto the next part! We should mention that the stock bushing in the distributor allows for 21-degrees of mechanical advance. Setting the initial timing for these pulls meat that we were at a weak sauce 29-degrees at full advance. We'll talk about changing the curve and bushing in an upcoming story.

Note that in this photo, Travis has abdicated the driving duties on the dyno to yours truly as he has had quite enough "fun" with the driveshafts flying out of the car. The fact that he's standing this close to the thing means that it is probably just idling here.

Next up we decided to swap our new Holley 650 carb in place of the grungy, stock computer feedback Q-Jet. We went with a vacuum secondary style Holley. Another slightly different variation on this carb is the fact that it is a spread-bore style like a Q-Jet. We've always wanted to mess with one of these and since the engine is a mild piece, we figured it would be well up to the task, especially when noting the condition and driving characteristics of the old Q-Jet. It was stumbling and bumbling virtually everywhere but full throttle.

Here's another quick shot of the carb in case you have never seen a Holley before. If that's the case you are reading the wrong site!

Since we wanted to get the best comparison between the stock intake and the new Weiand we were about to bolt on, we decided to run the Holley on the stock cast iron piece first and then pull the top of the engine apart. Looks racey in there, huh?

We were confronted with a couple of issues when swapping the carb. The first was that the vacuum diaphram on the side of the Holley ran smack dab into the factory EGR valve. We solved that by pulling off the EGR, cutting its diaphragm off with a hack saw and then welding up the hole. It was a quick solution. Also, we needed to cut and bridge the fuel line with a piece of rubber to have it meet the Holley as well as source a new vacuum fitting for the rear of the carb as the one on the Q-Jet will not swap over. These things killed even more time.

Here's the carb in position and ready to go. It sure looks a hell of a lot better than the Q-Jet did. But how did it run?

Firstly, yes we moved the return springs to the right position before starting the car. Secondly, the Holley had better AFRs than the Q-Jet until we got to the 4,000 RPM range where it was leaner. The Q-Jet actually made more peak power by 2hp on the dyno, but the Holley eliminated all the weird stumbling and flat spots we were experiencing with the Q-Jet. Because our jet kit was sitting 30 miles away at home, we didn't re-jet the carb this time. That'll be in an upcoming story. So the results are that after this pull we sat at 187hp at the wheels.

Next up we pulled the intake manifold to install our new Weiand Street Warrior. We were all very interested to see what the innards of the 350 would look like and were happy to see no sludge and a very clean valley. We'll get to the surprising reason this is the case in one of the next updates. Yes, this is a factory roller engine as we expected.

Here's our new Weiand Street Warrior sitting next to the stock cast iron lump. The dual plane Street Warrior is designed to work best between 2,000 and 5,500 RPM which is just where we want this baby to live and work. With a stock rotating assembly, asking for lots more than that can get troublesome in a hurry. Remember, we're also assuming that this engine has 185,000+ miles on it as well!

Here's a side view of both manifolds for comparison. The already heavy iron manifold was probably made 5lbs heavier by all the grime and junk on it.

I cleaned up the cylinder head mating surfaces while the other guys prepped the manifold. This view had us begging for more time to at least gasket match the ports, but we were already way behind the eight ball.

Tony put the thermostat in, bolted down the thermostat housing, and added a pipe plug to keep us from having a coolant geyser. Note the organized manner of our working conditions.We had crap spread half way across Travis's place. The man is a saint.

We bolted the carb to the manifold and installed them both as one piece. After dropping it on and torquing the bolts, we just had to reconnect a couple of hoses and vacuum lines and then it was go time.

Our Weiand Street Warrior really did a nice job of making the 350 sit up and talk to us. While peak power was only up 10hp, we had huge gains from 2200 RPM to 4000 RPM. For instance, at 3000 RPM, with the stock intake (same ignition timing, and same carb jetting as previous pulls) the engine was making 105hp, but with the new intake, at the same exact spot it was making 135+. When laying the two pulls on top of each other, the lines converge at 4,000 RPM where either our stock MSD advance was out of gas, the stock cam was done, or the cylinder head and exhaust manifold package was dunzarino as well.

So at the end of the day we came in with 176hp and left with 197hp at peak. More importantly we had made huge gains in the power curve and the car was instantly more fun to drive with tons more power from 2000-4000 RPM. We ran out of time after making the intake manifold pulls. The loss of a big chunk of the morning running for parts, fixing the driveshaft, and getting stuff to fit cost us dearly in productivity. The good news was that we left with a plan to bolt on our Flowtech headers and return to the dyno shop asap to resume the testing again, ultimately adding our new valvetrain parts and camshaft from COMP. If we had been better prepared with the Holley jet kit on this trip we would have been able to see more improvement. Also, we probably should have taken the time to work on the distributor with an advance bushing and springs to tweak the curve, but we didn't during this visit. We were happy with what we got done and the results of our effort. We were also happy that we cruised the car 30+ miles each way with open exhaust and didn't get a ticket. There's more power to be had here as we simply left the parts box stock when installed. In upcoming installments we'll show you the effect that jetting, timing, and other changes have on this very basic combo. We're trying to keep this thing as real world as possible and that means making mistakes, gaffes, and discoveries along the way. It may make you want to slap us now and again, but we're OK with that. We live in a world where not everything goes right all the time. How 'bout you?

We owe a huge debt of thanks to Travis Johnson, the owner of Performance Auto and Dyno in Plymouth, Mass (rear right), his right hand man Ben Dahlgreen (the bearded muchacho rear left), Tony Maffini (ugly bastard front left), and Dave Nutting (creepy guy front center) for all their help and for eating the pizza we bought. The greasy dumbass on the right was just an impediment to progress.

Parts and pieces used in this story with prices - (all prices from SummitRacing.com)

STAY TUNED FOR NEXT WEEK'S STORY - WE GET SURPRISED, WE GET SAD, THEN WE GET EVEN WITH BUFORD T JUSTICE FOR THROWING US A CURVE BALL!