Holley Sniper 2300 Installation on M715 Tornado
So I figured while I work the trucks paper work through DMV limbo I'd contribute to the collective information on this forum. I intend for this to be a brief write up on swapping from the single barrel carb to the holley sniper efi 2300.
The reasons I performed this mod were that I wanted my truck to fire up even in below zero weather and that eventually I intent to put a chevy 350 in place and having this system already in place makes the swap a little easier.
A warning upfront if you intend to perform this swap you'll need a civilian intake manifold and you'll need to be able to come up with a custom adapter plate and throttle bracket. Other than that it was fairly straight forward. Also bare in mind my truck has already been shade tree swapped to 12 volt by the previous owner and due to a leak I had already fabricated a new aluminum fuel tank with fittings in mind for fuel injection.
To start I had to drain the coolant, remove the original carburetor and intake manifold and replace it with the "new" civilian manifold. The main Challenge I had with this was removing the thermostat housing and spacer as the studs were completely frozen with rust and this needed Oxy Acetylene. The lower manifold bolts were a small struggle but i got them. I just sealed everything up with permtex ultra blue and ultra grey and it seemed to hold under coolant pressure.
I then had to drill a hole into the original distributor cap and run a wire from coil negative to the designated wire on the harness, the ring terminal inside the distributor was definitely a tight fit but it worked. While I was on this side of the engine I also drilled the exhaust for the O2 sensor which probably the easiest part of the project because of the shape of the stock manifold.
Next was installing the new fuel pump to the frame rail and running the wire from the harness to it and later at the end running my hoses this was pretty self explanatory because I had already had an electric fuel pump for the carb. But if you don't then youll have to remove the mechanical pump.
Then came the biggest heartache of the project putting the throttle body on the manifold and finding out that there was no way it would work due to the inlet and outlet fittings WITHOUT the 1" barbs were hitting the rocker cover.... Or so I thought, after cleaning up for the night as it was 2am and i was crushed I went to bed scratching my head and sometime the next day at work it had come to me that if I were able to rotate the throttle body 180 degrees so the fittings came off the side of the engine, problem is that the bores on the manifold and the bores on the throttle body are offset about 1/4" off center of the holley bolt pattern. So I needed to make a new spacer from 1" aluminum plate that would relocate the bores so I could rotate the throttle body. Which was great and all except I don't have access to a milling machine... So I decided to do the next best thing which was a forstner bit in a drill press with good clamps which works better than you'd expect. I made a cardboard pattern to set my hole centers in relation to the manifold bolt pattern and then drilled each bore on its respective center 1/2 way through the plate. I then die ground and sanded the bores until I was happy with how they looked. This did exactly what I intended and allowed the throttle body to be mounted such that the fittings came off the side of the engine.
The last step was to plumb and wire everything and replace my coolant hoses (as I did this at the same time), obviously refill the coolant, and just follow the steps for initial startup of the efi unit.
I hope that this might help guide someone should they chose to undertake this project but please keep in mind that this isn't all inclusive there are many things I had to do that I just do and don't really think about even though i'm young and still being taught to fabricate. Please if you have any questions feel free to ask I'll offer whatever advice I can.
The Main Problem and Adapter Plate
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Various Pictures of the project (the whole trucks wiring is a mess and needs to be pretty much redone so I wasn't too concerned with cleaning it up at the moment)
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Thanks for reading Ben S.
