[Tom Vaught]

I have posted about the Holley 3-BBL carb in the past but want to add some additional info on this carb.

Back in the June 1966 time frame, Holley was doing some carb testing on the Holley 3-BBL carb. The idea of the 3-BBL carb was not new, Jon Hargrove could tell you a story about a 3-BBL AFB that Pontiac Motors and Carter Carburetor came up with a few years earlier.

This carb was larger in actual air flow vs the largest typical Holley carb at the time, the #3310 Holley 780 cfm carb. There were some 850 cfm carbs out there too. Chevrolet actually offered a vacuum secondary 850 carb at one point. But back to the 3-BBL.

The new #3916 Holley carb flowed an actual 950 cfm on the Holley Carb flow bench in Warren Michigan.

So how did it do on the engine dyno?

With a Edelbrock "3-BBL intake installed (rear intake barrels had a notch cut into the plenum divider for 3-BBL throttle blade clearance) the carb/intake was worth 33 more HP over the typical 780 carb and intake at 5000 rpm.

The #3916 carb was 8 tenths of a second faster on acceleration runs on the street.
The Edelbrock #3916 testing used #80 jets on the primary and drilled .086" read orifices in the metering plate.

The actual dyno HP differences were:
31 Hp @ 4500
33 Hp @ 5000
33 Hp @ 5500
25 Hp @ 6500
20 Hp @ 7000

Edelbrock wanted to sell the intake to go with the 950 cfm carb so they cut a deal specifying that the only way you could get the carb was by buying the Edelbrock intake at the same time.
Motion Performance ran a lot of these carb/intake set-ups on their modded chevy engine packages.

Tom V.