Hi everyone, I finally was able to put together a correct "253" carb for my '68 When I bought the car I got the original airhorn & floatbowl in a box. they were in bad shape! The float bowl was stripped & cracked at the fuel inlet,therefore unusable The original date-coded throttle base plate & the '68 only choke linkage was still on the car attached to a Buick floatbowl & top! It ran pretty good but I wanted to put a correct carb on it. I was able to find a decent rebuild-able carb on ebay so I sent all the parts to Carb Junkys in Atlanta for a replating & fuel inlet repair.I was very happy with their work! With plating & other new parts, I easily have $500 in this stupid carb(I put in together myself). But it runs great & hey it's only money,right!!! Don't be mad about the big-block chevy choke!! I'm running the later Edelbrock O4B with the Qjet bump-outs but it has the later tube style choke housing,I just machined up a plate to mount the chevy choke,made link out of 1/8 brass rod. It works perfectly!! I still have the factory iron intake &choke coil for the next owner!!

 

Nice work, your engine bay looks great!
Tom
68 442
70 F85

 

Awesome!

 

Holy CRAP that engine bay is clean!

 

Wow!
Very, nice engine bay.

 

Thanks for the nice comments! I put in tons of work detailing the whole car. It was never in salt so it made cleaning things that much easier!

 

Looking good, Rob! That's a rare carb there. Interesting that the broadcast code for that carb (if I read it right) is RJ? That would be the same as the 251 carbs that were also used in the same (442 manual trans) application.

 

Thanks for the comments,Kurt I don't know the history of the float bowl that I used on my carb as I bought it & some other qjet parts online, I was quite a lengthy search finding a true,usable '68 float bowl to go with the original top & base plate that I got with the car(the original bowl was damaged beyond repair,it had been stored in a leaky shed for years & was so corroded & cracked at the fuel inlet)I couldn't make out the letter codes (it looked like it may have been RK).Luckily the top was still usable but you can see the one corner has some corrosion on it in the pics I put up. The info on the correct carb for '68 is a little murky. I've seen some lists that show the 251 for all 442s & all 455s except toros & others that show the 253 for the 350 hp stick cars only,both came with the same "49b" & "AU" metering rods but the 253 had #72 jets instead of #71s in the 251. The wildabout cars site is awesome by the way,Great resource !!