(engines rev)
- That looks really good (laughs).
- [Matt] So, we're gonna be runnin' this place more often?
- [Davin] I can't think of anything better to do (laughs).
(drawer thuds)
(drills whir)
- I'm Matt Lewis with Haggerty Classic Cars
- and today, Davin and I
are gonna be installing a Holley EFI system,
the terminator system, on his Chevelle.
- Yep, I'm making the break from a carburetor,
good old-fashioned, proven technology we'll say,
to a EFI, but I'm excited about it, it's going to be fun.
- To a world that I'm used to.
- It's got a lot of wires, man.
- It does.
- The whole idea here is Holley came to us and said,
"Hey, how would you like to do an install on a classic car?"
And given the fact that my personal car, a '66 Chevelle,
is not bone stock original,
so I'm not taking away from any kind of holy grail,
I said, "Sure, why not? Sounds like a great idea."
- We are approaching this somewhat
scientifically though, right?
Absolutely. We're not trying to make everything
completely subjective.
- Right.
- So the first test we're gonna do
is what we call our "butt dyno"
which is good old-fashioned,
I have no tools available to me,
other than a very safe location to do this--
- And a tape measure. - And a tape measure.
- That's right. But it is worth noting,
while you were on the drag strip--
- Yeah, I'm fully aware that I'm responsible
for anything that would have happened on the track.
- Pretty much any insurance policy you come across,
racing (clicks tongue), no go.
You're not covered at all while you're on the track.
(engine revs as car starts)
- All right, so my scientific test is--
- Line up and start.
- We're gonna leave it in drive,
I'm gonna look out here real quick,
and all I'm gonna do is line up
to the white lines--
- All right, we're on the stripe.
- Yep, I am gonna brake torque only enough
to bring the rpm up and then just basically tomp it
and what happens, happens.
- (energetic rock music) - (tires squeal)
- There we go.
- All right. There's the beauty of--
- It made noise.
- of an automatic.
- [Davin] There's two. (tires squeal)
- Oh! Stickier tires-- - You're hot, you're hotter.
- (laughs) - That's right.
(energetic rock music) (tires squeal)
- The other test we're doing,
we are already at Northern Michigan Dragway,
so we might as well take it down the eighth mile
and get a couple times in to see how fast you can go
before we install anything.
- Yeah, that way we have a real world data point we'll say,
that shows this is the performance more or less.
(engines rev loudly)
- Gonna leave it in drive, let the tranny do the shiftin'.
We'll do the same thing as far as launch.
We'll work on 2,000.
(tires squeal) (engine revs)
(intense energetic rock music)
- Yeah. I gotta give you the full experience.
- Great.
(engine revs) (energetic rock music)
(tires squeal)
- Stall it?
- That's why I don't like this carburetor.
(intense energetic rock music) (engine revs)
(tires squeal)
- The next one will be true chassis dyno testing.
This is the horsepower and torque numbers that you get
to the rear wheels, which again is a real world test.
- Yeah. - With data though.
- And right in our backyard, we have LoveFab--
- [Davin] Yes. - who do excellent work
with modern cars, but they have a dyno.
- [Davin] Yep, and he was tickled to death
when I said I was going from a carburetor to EFI.
(engines revving) (intense rock music)
- Not that this is the most important thing in a classic car
but it certainly is a nice extra, we'll say.
- It'll be a testament to what this system is capable of.
- Yeah, which is our fuel mileage test.
So, in that, what we're gonna do is we're gonna
top the tank completely off.
It has the old school filler neck
that you can see the fuel come up into.
We'll bring that fuel right up to the top level,
top it off, leave that gas station,
make a beautiful route up the peninsula here,
and come back to the same exact spot and top the fuel off,
and we'll know exactly what we used for fuel,
and then we'll do the same exact comparison
with the EFI system.
- Do a wine tour while we're up here?
- That doesn't sound bad.
I could have my wife come and get us
when we're done (laughs).
- [Matt] She likes driving the Chevelle, doesn't she?
- [Davin] She won't mind.
(energetic rock music)
- The part that will be subjective is
obviously the maintenance of a carburetor, let's say.
- The tunability of the EFI,
and of course it's just more convenient.
The reliability side of it.
- Well, right. You can walk up to it and fire it up
any time of the year.
- Right. Without pumping the gas (claps hands) 14 times.
- (laughs) That's right.
- I did a little perusing of the instructions,
I know that's kind of like cheating in man world.
- Absolutely.
- But at any rate, I did notice
that there is no ridiculously special tools.
- No, it's actually a fairly short tool list.
- I mean, I got a small blade screwdriver,
I mean heck, this should be easy.
- Who doesn't have a number two Phillips, huh?
- Yeah. Now granted, I have collected a couple--
- Extras.
- extra tools here and there
that I think might make things just a pinch easier,
but there's certainly no reason
you can't do this on your back
in your driveway in a safe manner.
- I've done plenty of stuff like this on jack stands.
- [Davin] So we have a throttle body with the fuel injectors
and all the sensors.
- [Matt] Yeah.
- [Davin] Bolt on, bolt off for the carburetor.
An exhaust sensor,
O2 sensor to other folks.
Fuel pressure regulator
for the billet fuel pump
with a pre-filter and a post-filter.
Fuel pressure sensor
and then we have the controller
to set up all the programming.
- The programmer, and over on my side of the table,
I've got wires, with wires,
and wires, and wires.
But, not to get too daunting with this wire thing,
they are all very clearly labelled
and they come with a little porty on the end
so you don't have to worry about
where they go or what they fit into.
It's all labeled out for you.
And finally, the brains of it all, the ECM.
- Excellent. All right, so the other item we have
is of course plumbing up the fuel line,
we got all the fuel fittings.
- And, beautiful braided fuel line.
- There we go.
- Let's get going. - Let's do it.
(energetic rock music)
(energetic rock music intensifies with bass)
(whirs over music)
- [Davin] Holley EFI ... nothing?
(engine revs as car starts)
- There you have it.
We have a table full of parts
and one installed Holley EFI system.
- Yes we have.
And it fired up within about the third or fourth try.
- Right. Once we figured out
there was a little bit of a vacuum issue,
it was alarmingly plug-and-play.
- In fact, I'm gonna say the most difficult piece
of putting the whole system together
is the fact that this car never had a return fuel line,
so had to drop the tank and weld a bung into the tank
for the return line, which I took to a professional to do,
only because I have never done that in the past
so basically put it on him.
- And welding around fuel seems like something that
probably should be left to professionals.
- At least experienced.
- So beyond that, I mean really the difficult parts
were working with braided fuel lines--
- [Davin] Yep.
- [Matt] which isn't terribly difficult--
- [Davin] No, no.
- [Matt] but it's something you have to learn.
Running some electrical wires,
and tidying them up, making them neat.
- [Davin] Correct.
- [Matt] And then a little bit with that little controller,
figuring out getting through menus
and being efficient with that.
But, all in all, I was pretty surprised with how this thing
fired up as soon as we got going.
The programmer has a really nice setup wizard.
You select your CID,
you select your ignition type,
the type of cam you have, and you run with it.
- Gives you a nice place to start, nice calibration point.
- It does. And then the nice thing about these,
with all the sensors is it learns and it figures itself out,
starts to smooth out and gets nice.
- It does. It's kind of funny how it goes,
"I'm searching, I'm searching, I'm searching,
(voice drops) I'm searching, I'm searching, okay I'm happy."
- Yeah.
- So from here, we need to do some more driving
for it to self-learn, and then--
- Run it through the paces, same thing we did
before we got the kit.
- Yep, off to the dyno, do our fuel test, and hit
the drag strip for hopefully a little faster times as well.
(engine running)
(energetic, upbeat rock music)
(rock music intensifies) (engine revs loudly)
- The dyno was great.
328 horse to 360, right?
- Yes, that's phenomenal.
- And 460 foot pounds to just over 500.
- Yep, which, I'll guess shame on me,
kind of shows that my carburetor tuning abilities
may not be as good as I'd like to think it is.
- Right.
- But it was an old carburetor.
- Not every car is going to see
that kind of increase from this kit.
Even Holley says it's not a performance upgrade necessarily.
- The ease of putting the fuel injection on, starting it up,
tuning it in the self tune mode was phenomenal.
And add in that little kicker with the extra dyno tune
to speed that process up, definitely showed its results.
- Absolutely, and that was fuel economy, we saw that too.
- I think that is the largest shock for me.
I fully expected them to be better,
but I was thinking maybe three to four percent, not 20.
A little over 11 going into it, and now over 14.
That's tremendous.
So now, at the drag strip we did our butt dyno
and running ETs.
Butt dyno, pretty impressive, would you say?
- It was impressive last week.
- It was impressive last week, yes.
But doubling --
- This was super impressive.
- more than doubling the distance, I think was huge.
- This is a clear example of power exceeding grip.
- All right, so at two grand.
(engine idling over rock music)
- All right, there's two grand, and ...
(engine revs) (tires squeal)
- (laughs)
- I think you did a little bit more on that one.
- It was all rev limiter.
(engine revs) (tires squeal)
(intense rock music)
- Evidently these radial tires have a limitation of torque
being applied to them.
- Right, it's just under 500 (laughs).
- Uh, yeah (laughs).
Yes, because things were one-for-one test method
and purely different in a big manner.
- Yeah, more that twice the strip.
- Correct.
- 201 feet.
- And a little squirmier, I might add.
- Well that's just fun. - Yeah.
Okay, so our ET results initially,
I was a little disappointed.
- Yeah.
- Other than maybe the show put on wouldn't be so bad.
- Right, you did smoke the tires for an entire eighth mile.
(engine idles) (intense energetic rock music)
(tires squeal) (engine revs loudly)
- (laughs)
- You smoked the tires the whole eighth mile.
- (laughs loudly)
- I'd say there's not enough compound down.
That was not a good pass.
- Yeah, not exactly what you're looking for though,
in this method of test.
- [Matt] Right, right, as fun as it is ... (laughs)
- Yeah so obviously the additional power
I needed to back out of that rpm
and finally ended up lowering some tire pressure
to get a little more bite.
(engines revving) (tires squeal)
(intense energetic rock music)
- We still gained three tenths.
- We did. While smoking the tires.
- (laughs) While smoking the tires, yeah.
So little quicker and impressive looking, I guess we'll say.
So overall, easy to install
- Easy to install.
- Performance improvements all the way around
in our scenario
and I think every test will improve
on the efficiency and the capability, reliability.
- Yeah, as that system learns, it's just gonna get better.
- I guess maybe enough of this, and let's go drive.
- Yeah we should let the system learn some more.
- Yeah, I think so.
- I think that's good.
(engines rev) (tires squeal)
(engine idling)