How It All Started

     I started working offshore in 2007.  I was gone 8-9 months a year and rarely had time for anything other aside from that job.  In mid summer 2014 I took a job on a different boat.  The schedule was equal time, I would be home a month at a time.  It didn't take long for me to finish my own projects, like my 76 F100 and 63.5 Galaxie.

During this time I kinda got bored and started taking on side work for hobby money.

If a local had an engine, transmission, carburetor, whatever, I was willing to work on it.

It didn't take long before I noticed that no one understood how carburetors worked.

 

     During this time I built a 2x4 FE for my Galaxie, and my tuning had to get a bit more advanced.... I realized I truly didn't understand how carburetors worked.

So, I started reading everything I could about carbs, fluid mechanics, whatever....  and testing what I could.  At this point I wanted to learn plating, and to make these things look nicer.  I obsessed nonstop about attaining the most original coatings that I could. 

People encouraged me to do so, and there appeared to be a ton of folks who wanted me to work on the stuff.

 

     So Dec 2, 2017 I started the AirFuelSpark facebook page.

Aside from posting my build threads and videos of the carburetors running, I felt this was a great platform for instruction. 

I tried to always post videos and information that I had learned. 

I am the type of person who has has always wanted to do the work myself. I assume there are many more like me, who would prefer to truly build everything themselves, but simply lacked the information. 

 

Of course in the year 2022, carburetor knowledge is no longer commonplace. The corner automotive shop is gone. I feel if you wish to drive a carbureted vehicle in this era, you need to learn at the very least the basics yourself. 

 

With the close of 2021 I had restored or rebuilt over 1,000 Holley carburetors. 

 

During this period, many small original parts were unavailable or incredibly expensive to attain. Some of these parts like Ford’s vacuum advance plug were critical for me to restore carbs, and I never seemed to have any.   There were modern replacements, but they looked nothing like the original. 

I contacted a friend and sent him an original with some drawings and he programmed it into his cnc lathe. 

I am very picky and detail oriented and wanted these as exact reproductions, I wanted to not be able to tell the difference between an original and these new parts. 

So now I had 1,000 of them. 

I have done this with dozens of parts. I feel having exact replicas of these small parts set me apart from the average restorer. 

Of course the flipside is that I now had thousands of parts when I only needed a few hundred. 

The same is true for gaskets and rebuild kits. 

I have never been satisfied with off the shelf kits. 

I spend a great deal of time sourcing the exact soft parts I wish to use when rebuilding these carburetors. 

No good rebuild kits are available for the highly specific needs of the Ford Holley carburetors I build, so I make my own. 

I am but one man, doing this part time, and many people are like me and prefer to do the work themselves. 

The sensible thing to do was to offer these parts, as well as instruction on a webpage to the general public.  When you buy parts or rebuild kits from this page, you are buying the exact same parts I myself use.