The Solex carburetors were a major competitor to WEBER for almost 60 years — and today they are owned by the same parent company. Car manufacturers regularly brand products. Does that mean it is a Cadillac? Ford jointly builds a car with Mazda and Probe with primarily Mazda drive train — does that make it a Ford?
Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Saturn, Cadillac, etc. In the case of GM they needed a nice midsized vehicle and the Opel was easy to brand a Cadillac. Was GM hiding something from the public if they did not disclose that the Cadillac they were buying was really an Opel? This is the problem with branding licensing a product — the consumer may be buying something they believe is one brand — when in fact it is made, designed, and or engineered by a different company.
Both companies can be owned by the same parent company — but are they the same? Certain companies have no affiliation other than maintaining licensing and manufacturing agreements with Magneti Marelli with the Italian designed and Spanish built Weber carburetors.
Next, make sure to size the setup to your engine needs. Finally, spend the time and money to tune it right. Good article. It is particularly true that on siamesed port engines the benefits of Webers re low and given that new Webers come set up for some other application and the tuning to your engine is a combination of experience and science that most owners lack, it really isn't that attractive a mod except to those who desire the look of the Webers for braggig rights.
Go to one intake port per cylinder and things shift a bit more toward the Webers and it becomes worth the exercise to fit and tune them for a street performance car or a race car I have always used Webers only on my race cars powered by MG engines. Would have been nice to see some test results on the SU 2" HD8's. Tuning on the dyno is the only way to accurately tune any performance motor. I've worked with SU's and Webers. Lucky enought to live close to Pierce Manifolds for my Datsun Z setup.
Webers let me tweak settings as I add modifications or change my driving style. Flow is too slow at part throttle and they don't run ell except on wide open throttle, and even then only when tuned exactly right. It gets you little to have a horsepower or two more at top rpm if you lost time getting there.
Sam - we are lucky to have local shops that specialize in Italian cars and keep full sets of jets that they will charge a fee for plus whatever it costs to replace stock once you know what you need. I am lucky that I never had to do anything but fine tuning on my V12 Lamborghini, but that would have been the way to go. We had local racers that got them properly set up and they were one sweet set up once they got them optimized!
With modern cam design, true technical head porting, and a few additional American tuner tricks the period factory teams couldn't do, didn't have knowledge of or have time to install and test, I've achieve performance far beyond any Healey they prepared for road racing.
Well done if you have managed a triple 2" set up that has good transition through the rpm range. I don't think that could ever be done with the twin 2" on an MGB engine. The flow rate on those totals cfm. I beleive that Vizard said that a 2" SU can flow cfm on the bench and I would think that a 3 liter pushrod C series would be hard pushed to need cfm at red line.
Very interesting article and comments too! The power figures for the four different carbs are so close that I'd bet that a proper statistical analysis would find them indistinguishable. Then the choice comes down to the other factors -tuneability, drivability, convenience, You'll need to log in to post. Log in. A vacuum advanced distributor helps street manners. Some carburetors are easier to tune than others. Jetting changes for a Weber DCOE are quickly made after loosening a wing nut and removing the cap below.
Jetting changes for an SU require removing the dashpot and piston three screws before changing the needle one more setscrew. Then in Weber created his first dual-throat carburetor in the modern sense of the term. It was called the 50DCO and had two identical throats and two throttle plates which acted simultaneously.
The sole purpose behind resorting to this construction was to cause the carburetor throat area to cover the length of the rotors of the cc engine's Roots supercharger. Maserati enjoyed the most brilliant success in the early s and Weber's fame and experience grew.
By they were standard equipment on all Alfa Romeo race cars. It was the year after the Alfetta's final conquest of the international road racing championship that Alf Francis carried the facts and figures of Weber performance back to England's racing fraternity.
During the same period Ferrari and Maserati successes in North and South America began to turn the attention of the race-wise to the carburetors of the winning engines. Edoardo Weber, knighted by his government for his contributions to the nation's technology, died in But the seed that he had sown was to yield ever-richer harvests. After Weber's death Fiat began to invest in the little company and by had acquired half of its assets.
It was still essentially just a good-sized artisan workshop producing a few thousand carburetors per month when, at that point, Fiat bought most of the remaining Weber stock. New engineering and managerial talent and new capital were poured into the company and a massive development program was launched that was precisely in step with the beginnings of Italy's "economic miracle. The vast majority of these are ordinary, mass-produced "cooking" carburetors that come as standard equipment on practically all Fiats.
However, it is the highly specialized carburetors for pure racing machines that say Weber to the enthusiast and in this field their conquests continue to increase. In the U. In the F1A world championships the carburetors most consistently used naturally are Webers. The name is synonymous with performance. Nearly everyone who is aware of this assumes it to be so because of special design features that are exclusive with Weber, but this is not the case at all.
The facts are that Weber uses the same basic jets as everyone else and there are no structural characteristics that are typically Weber. From the design standpoint it is normalissimo.
The most distinctive feature of most high-performance models, perhaps, is the ease with which jet, emulsion tube and venturi sizes can be changed. There was a time when certain makes of carburetor had their own typical architecture and were different from all others.
However, all the major patents in this field expired long ago and for many years the world's leading carburetor manufacturers have had the free use of each other's ideas. Some ideas originated by Weber now are used by many other manufacturers and Weber is indebted to many of them for ideas which it has borrowed. The result is that all modern carburetors are basically the same, have the same essential circuitry and design features.
Weber happens to be very strong in the 2-throat field but is far from being alone there and has no exclusive claim on that principle. The reasons for Weber's excellence are deeper and more subtle than mere design.
The most fundamental reason is the firm's traditional and absolutely uncompromising pursuit of quality in every sense. From the earliest days it has been Weber's practice to tailor its carburetors to specific engines, as opposed to producing one carburetor that can be adapted to a diversity of engines. Swappable emulsion tubes let you shift when the various jets take effect, relative to throttle opening and engine load.
Later DCOs even let you adjust airflow balance between the carburetor's twin throats, accounting for carb wear or a single weak cylinder. The list goes on.
All of it can transform how a car drives. Not that Italy had a monopoly on this sort of thing. The American Holley downdraft, popular on postwar V8s, uses similar thinking. It rose to prominence for a reason. But Webers pioneered a certain brand of methodical flexibility—they let the average person tweak virtually everything worth tweaking, cylinder by cylinder, from a seemingly endless catalog of meticulously developed parts.
They are durable and simple, with relatively few moving parts. And unlike a lot of carburetors, nearly everything critical to a Weber's operation can be changed in minutes, by the side of the road.
Weber tuning takes time, but when you get it right, the results are transcendent: easy starts, lightning response, good power, and no surging in traffic. Plus the reliability of a stone and diabolical intake noise.
Freed of an air filter, most Webers sound like hell's Disposall. As with a lot of things on vintage cars, the looks and noise are half the draw.
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