Rebuilding the Holley Carburetor

Now it was time to rebuild my carb. The model number was 80457-S so it was a basic four barrel 600 cfm street carburetor with electric choke. It was working OK but there seemed to be some problems. We took the air filter off and checked how it was supplying gas. Some booster venturis were working correctly but some didn't atomize the fuel properly. Large drops of fuel came out instead of a nice spray. I hoped that a good cleaning and rebuild kit would fix this.

Starting point

Once again I visited US-Parts and they had the correct rebuild kit in storage. Armed with it, I began disassembling the carb. As this was my first carb rebuild, I searched for good online instructions. I found a few but the one on Chevy High Performances page had the best pictures I saw.

Float bowls removed

Metering block out

Carb disassembled

I didn't really run into any major problems during the rebuild. I took pictures during disassembly so I could reference them while putting the carb back together. I also had a piece of cardboard and I pushed many bolts and other small parts through it so I could get all of them back in the same place. Oh, and that I wouldn't drop them...

When the carb was in pieces, I sprayed it with some CRC carburetor cleaner. This got the dirt off but there was some oxidation on the surface that I could not get out. So the Holley didn't look like new but at least it was now clean.

Stuff in the rebuild kit

One small mistake that I made was that I took the choke cap off unnecessarely. Luckily this video advised how it should be set back. Rest of the assembly went quite smoothly. I just compared the old gasgets to the new ones in the kit and put everything back together. Finally I sprayed some lubricant to all the the joints and other moving parts and the rebuild was done!

Carburetor rebuild done!

Now I'll just have to test the carb after getting the engine back together...