A Trip Inside the Edelbrock Carburetor Factory
CAR AND DRIVER
Carburetors disappeared from production cars about 30 years ago. But in Sanford, North Carolina, production is still going strong.
The carburetor is an archaic device. The analog precursor to electronic fuel injection had a good run, but by the early 1990s carburetors were mostly extinct from new cars. It would follow, you'd think, that the factories that make carburetors would go extinct as well, right along with the ones that made cassette tapes, camera film, and typewriters. But every weekday in Sanford, North Carolina, about 100 employees punch in at the big white building on Clyde Rhyne Drive and set to work building four-barrel Edelbrocks. If the carburetor is extinct, nobody told Edelbrock, which makes about 450 of them per day.
CAR AND DRIVER
CAR AND DRIVER
As it turns out, we still need carburetors for the simple reason that we still drive cars that are old enough to have them. And carburetors wear out, gunk up, and pitch fits. When a carb is suspect, it's far simpler to replace it than trouble-shoot the labyrinth inside. Unbolt your old carb, slap on a new one and your old car runs great again. It's one of the more satisfying upgrades you're going to make for less than $400. And thus, the Edelbrock factory endures.
CAR AND DRIVER
"Our plan has been to build 400 a day, but we keep building more," says plant manager Todd Belcher. The big pieces, the body and air horn, come from Appalachian Cast Products in Virginia, but some of the smelting is handled here—namely the zinc venturis. "That's where the air and fuel come together, so we want to have a lot of control over that," says Belcher. Pallets of zinc ingots sit at one end of the factory, waiting to become venturis. Not far away, there's a work station where the body castings are cleaned up, the flashing removed by hand with files. Not a lot of robots here.
CAR AND DRIVER
There are a lot of cool old machines, though, many of which date from the 1960s—or maybe earlier. For instance, the Jones & Lamson Model PC-14A Optical Comparator and Measuring Machine is used to spot-check components for the correct specs. "It basically projects light and casts a shadow up on the screen, but it's accurate to tens of thousandths of an inch," says Chuck Powers, supervisor for components. "It's old, but it works!"
THE COMPARATOR. CAR AND DRIVER
That statement could apply to plenty of the other machines here, too (and, well, to the product that they're producing). The "way type" machine looks like it came out of an old-time mad scientist's laboratory, with a phalanx of electric drills pointed at different angles, lubricant hoses and wires splayed out behind them. This is how Edelbrock creates the precise, intricate passageways inside the carburetor. "This machine only does one thing, but it does it really well," Belcher says. "If you tried to do this with a CNC machine, it would take forever." Nearby is the plug and leak station, where the extraneous passages are plugged and tested for leaks. And why are there extraneous holes? Because the machine can't drill around corners. So when you create an internal passageway that's anything other than a straight shot, you end up with extra holes on the outside of the carb.
A WAY TYPE MACHINE. CAR AND DRIVER
Once the bodies and air horns are properly fettled, they go to a clean room where the final assembly happens—which means precise installation of the confounding array of tiny parts that make up a carburetor. And there are many—jets and needles and springs and floats, all arranged so that the Edelbrock atop your old Chevy 350 delivers the right amount of fuel when you turn the key or bury the throttle or coast down to a stop. Work stations are color coded according to difficulty of the task, from green (easy, all-day) to red (difficult and time-limited).
WHERE IT ALL COMES TOGETHER. CAR AND DRIVER
There are quality control checks all along the way—including ones to ensure the machines themselves are in spec—but this last room is where the finished product is inspected before it's boxed for shipment. Inevitably, some carbs earn a detour for further work, but most head back out to the main floor to be sent on their way.
CORES AWAIT THEIR TURN AT A REBUILD. CAR AND DRIVER
Adjacent to that area is a factory-within-the-factory. You know how you sometimes turn in a core when you buy a new part? This is where your Edelbrock carb core goes for a rebuild. (And maybe, thanks to the decades-long churn of acquisitions and consolidation, your Carter, Weber or Magneti-Marelli carbs, too.) Despite the wild-card nature of bum carbs, Belcher says the quality control process is, in a way, more straightforward on the rebuilds. "You know they worked at some point," he says.
CAR AND DRIVER
Perhaps Edelbrock doesn't build as many carburetors as it once did, but the business is still very much a going concern. Manufacturing carburetors doesn't require ultra-modern tooling and most of the research and development was done 50 years ago (as attested by the fantastic archive of blueprints stashed in an office). While the factory can switch up and build water pumps or intake manifolds, the main job remains cranking out Edelbrock four-barrels, 1405s and 1406s and 1906s. "This place goes as carburetors go, and they're doing great," Belcher says.
Nobody thinks carburetors will be around forever, necessarily, but their demise was erroneously foretold long before now. "When I started in this business, they told me that we might be building carbs for another two or three years," says Powers. "That was in 1993."
SOURCE: CAR AND DRIVER