By Nathan Bagster
Normally, you don’t see a Weber carb with anything more than one or two barrels. Making this a weird one for me right off the bat. But let’s start at the beginning.
A few years ago, a close friend of mine purchased a 1979 Foxbody Mustang. At the time I hadn’t seen the car and he wasn’t a huge car guy, so when I heard the price tag, I choked on my drink. But after he brought the car home, I was pleasantly surprised. I would go into the details here, but I plan on doing a full-fledged article in the future. Needless to say, his investment was well worth it.
What I can say, is that the engine is a hopped-up 302 Ford, and it came with this oddball carb sitting on the intake.
Now, he ran the car for about 3 years, alongside me and my ‘78 Monte Carlo, before parking it. Flashforward about 6 years and three lifetimes worth of events later, to last year - After a few chardonnays, and some trailing down memory lane, I convinced him to try and get the thing started.
Cut to us under the hood, listening to the awful sound of an engine not turning over and the reek of old fuel. There were SO MANY leaks coming from the cracked and crusted rubber line that made up the fuel system, and I believed it wasn’t getting a spark, so we decided to call it for the night. Over the course of the next few months, we made a bunch of plans to get back to the car and get it running, but alas, life gets in the way and soon New Hampshire winter was upon us.
Throughout the winter months, I kept placing the idea in his brain about getting a head start on the car for the summer of ’23, and he kept changing the subject. That was until he said the dreaded words every car enthusiast never wants to hear: “I want to sell it.” He explained that he was tired of waiting on the dream of getting it running, and not being a huge car guy, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to work on it.
Now it was crunch time.
If I had any money whatsoever, I would’ve bought it in a flash and got the thing running for him. But instead, I ran my mouth and convinced him that he had to at least try to turn a wrench on the car before completely giving up - “Rebuild the carb,” I said “I've done a few of them, and it’s the easiest, but most complicated thing to do besides tearing into the engine or transmission. If you hate it, sell the car, but if you enjoy it, we get the thing going.”
He agreed. Which brings us to now, rebuilding this 4-barrel Weber carburetor.
If I’m being honest, the most difficult part of this rebuild was finding the kit online, and that’s because it wasn’t exactly a standard model. Everything I found looked similar to what I was holding in my hand but had some huge differences to it. I ended up having to phone a friend who is much better at parts research, and he cracked the case.
So, what the hell exactly IS it?
Well, the short of it is, we don’t know the exact model, as we didn’t pull it from the box. But, using the stamped codes on the body of the carb (9637SA 0340), we were able to track down and find what would be an equivalent: the Carter AFB 9637S 625 CFM.
First and foremost, our model isn’t in circulation anymore, and because of that, there are no direct-to-model kits out there. We were able to find a few rebuilt carbs on sale for about $300-$350, but that defeated the entire purpose of the exercise. What we ended up with was an Edelbrock Carb AFB Rebuild Kit that serviced a slew of Edelbrock and Carter carbs – including *drumroll please* the 9637 series, like was stamped on the body of our boy.
Now, I bet you’re wondering why all the fussing about and tracking down the names just to find the kit, right? Well as it turns out, Weber and Edelbrock got together to make this carb with Carter. Which is why it has a similar body design to the basic Edelbrock. Subsequently, the model was commonly used for marine engines and became a bit of a one-off series.
A fun bit of trivia to note about my friend, the owner of the Mustang, he was a Boatsman in the Navy (that’s the life stuff that got in the way). Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
Anyway, from there, the kit was ordered and we made plans to sit down and rip into the thing on Memorial Day. I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty details of rebuilding a carburetor, because it’s just one of those things you have to do yourself to really understand. But I will say, the rebuild was 100% needed. When we cracked the lid from the body, I saw a little dust cloud puff out. Once inside, there was a lot of corrosion damage to the aluminum, from years of Ethanol abuse. And frankly, many of the gaskets were destroyed.
This being my friend's first rebuild, I made him do most of the work, helping where the more tricky parts hung him up, and keeping correct part orientation.
The whole process took us most of the afternoon to tear down, clean and rebuild. Most of the time suck came from my explanations of specific pieces and their jobs, and cleaning those old gaskets off. Dear lord, the gaskets took forever.
But a few hours and a dinner break later, we had a fully rebuilt carb.
The next step was to get the thing back on the Mustang and from there it should fire up, right? Wrong. See, I had forgotten about the possible no-spark concern from the year prior.
So after mucking about with the fuel system, we had spilled enough raw fuel in the engine compartment to ignite the car, should I try to test it.
Sure, there are plenty of tools to help diagnose a no-spark, but I didn’t have them with me so the old plug wire against something metal was my only option. Deciding against a huge blaze, we called it a night and made battle plans to return and diagnose the no-start in a few weeks.
Overall, even without the startup, the day had been a success in my opinion. And when I asked “So what do you think? Wanna keep it?” my buddy chuckled and said “Hell yeah.” That was good enough for me.
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