Except in high-performance applications.
And quite a few Holleys.
Neither of which is an improvement over Carter or Holley....
Overall, I'd say it was very close to 50/50 Holley and Carter.
And 80's Mopar copcars, too, after the TQ went out of production
50's thru about '68, after that it was the Carter AVS. Then around 70 or 71, it became mostly Holley 4-barrels (although the hi-po engines kept the AVS), and then the Thermoquad after that.And absolutely WONDERFUL when you take good care of them. IMO, it was the most advanced carb ever made before fuel injection ended the carb era. I've got a small stash of them, and currently run one on my 318 car. I get about 3 mpg better with it than any other carb I've used. When I built the engine in my 440 car, I put an M-1 intake on it but now I really wish I'd used a spread-bore intake so I could properly run a TQ. Especially in the winter when this high vapor-pressure winter-blend crap fuel tries to vapor-lock every time the outside temp gets over 60. I could run an adaptor, but that is pretty third-rate.
The Holley 2-barrels were creeping crud, and so were the 1-barrel Holleys that sometimes showed up on the slant-6 instead of the Carter BBS. But most 2-barrel Mopars got the Carter BBD, and that was a bulletproof little brick of a carb.
Holleys are a PITA no
Well, I happen to agree there. I'm a die-hard Carter guy. Holley and Autolite *both* used rubber diaphragm accelerator pumps that were just as likely to dump fuel all over the top of the intake manifold as they were to squirt it inside the carb :-/ Gotta admit, the Quadrajet is a nice piece too.
Oh, I agree there are always going to be quirks. To me that's 90% of the appeal of owning an old car- they have character and class. I was hoping you'd clarify what you thought the actual Mopar carb quirks were, because I was going to offer my opinion on what might have caused what you remember: on most 2-bbl small-block Mopars, the exhaust crossover passage below the carb had a tendency to plug up pretty solid with carbon over the course of about 5 years, particularly with a lot of short-trip driving. Once the carb heat was effectively blocked, all sorts of cold driveability problems cropped up. It doesn't seem to happen if you put dual exhausts on the car, and my suspicion is the slight imbalance in back-pressure is enough to keep the passage cleared out better.