Carter AFB: keep it? Go FI?

I seem to have a Carter AFB on my 304 in my 72 CJ5. It seems this is a 4 barrel carb with a good deal of adjustability. I remember hearing somewhere that a 4 barrel carb may not be a very good solution in higher elevations and i want to make sure that it is worth keeping before I try and rebuild it. I think I have a Motocraft 2100 in my Early Bronco and it's tuned very well and starts easily even in the cold and runs great at various angles. Interested in getting input on this carb and what options I might have on my 304 including FI options. Is there some type of throttle body FI that could be adapted?

 

It's a good carburetor - the Edelbrock carb is an AFB, licensed from Carter. IMO you only need to get the jetting right so that the mixture is right for your altitude - nothing intrinsically bad about a 4V for altitude. The only downside might be, if the CFM rating is too high for a 304, you might not be able to tune it for best driveability. If the carb is too big for the displacement, you won't have enough pressure change across the venturis to generate good fuel control signals at low speed.

Re EFI, how handy are you with electronics? If you want a turnkey package, Howell seems to have the best reputation. I'm pretty sure you can use the GM/SBC TBI with some minor hackery but you'd probably have to burn a PROM or flash memory. If you have a laptop and you are saavy to that sort of thing, that might be a good way to go. There are sites on the net about this. There's also the Megasquirt, which uses the GM hardware and requires you to build your own controller.

 

I'm a software developer by trade and very comfortable around electronics and wiring so I will look into the GM EFI. I have had a couple of vehicles with throttle body fuel-injection and they ran well up here and were pretty simple to maintain. I think a rebuild kit for the carb is about $25 so it's worth it just to rebuild it to get it back to original condition. I was also reading that you can replace some springs in the top of the AFB to tune it's operation, not sure if that helps with the altitude issue but at least there may be some flexibility there.