New: Tame Your Carb’s Idle & Drivability With K&N’s ECI Plate!

Tuning a carburetor is not difficult, but it can be time-consuming and often not result in every advantage you desire. If you lean out the idle circuit so that the engine idles cleanly at operating temperature, it will likely refuse to idle when cold (assuming this carb has no choke) and you have to feather the throttle to keep it running until the engine builds some heat. K&N’s electronic carburetor injection (ECI), places an injector under the carburetor and uses feedback from a wide-band oxygen sensor to not only help the engine run smoothly when cold, but will also stabilize the air-fuel mixture during light throttle cruise.

At around $699 street price, the ECI costs somewhere between a well-optioned street carburetor and an entry-level EFI system. Functionally, it bestows virtually all of the nice cold-start and drivability characteristics of a self-learning wide-band EFI system to a carburetor, but without the cost, complexity, or installation hassle of an EFI system. It’s the kind of speed product that in retrospect is so obviously needed, that we wonder why nobody thought of it sooner—it’s that cool.

The ECI system bolts under the carburetor using a 1-inch thick plate that looks a little like a nitrous plate. The key to take full advantage of the ECI system is to lean out both the idle and cruise mixture slightly. Then, using K&N’s software that plugs into a laptop, it’s easy to set the desired air-fuel ratio. Think of ECI like a feedback carburetor that can be easily controlled with a few laptop keystrokes. The ECI operates only as a fuel-add feature. It can’t lean out the air-fuel ratio, but if the tune is set slightly lean, it will add the necessary fuel to bring the air-fuel ratio exactly where you want it. It’s a simple idea and in many cases, simpler is better.