I thought I would post this with the hope of helping others out there avoid the costly mistake I made with my insistance to use a tripower set up that was on my 1959 impala 348 when I purchased it at auction a number of years ago. The car had a rochester three deuce set up which was not of the period and not original to the car. I noticed the car was running very rich and had these carbuerators rebuilt three times...literally...along with replacing the throttle bodies and linkage with kits commonly sold on the internet. The car was an original tripower car, but again did not have the original set up on it and I could not find an original set up to use, so I tried to perfect what I had...which was a mistake. To make a long story short, I continued to drive the car with the three deuce set up for years and continued to experience performance problems, fuel issues....and then finally decided a year ago to switch over to an edlebrock manifold and 4 barrel carb....it killed me to do it but I gave in because I wanted to drive the car, which again other than the carbs, was 100% original. Once I switched over the car drive beautifully...but apparently the damage was already done, unbeknowst to me. This past year in april I was driving the car and I literally burned through four quarts of oil during a 1.5 hour drive, it was not leaking...it was being burned. I brought the car to my mechanic and I had very low compression especially on number 1-2 cylinders. I had the motor pulled and taken apart and found that it had been recently rebuilt just before I bought it and in fact had very low mileage since the rebuild. There were extensive carbon deposits on the pistons, chrome rings.....and some minor wear....with the crankshaft needing to be replaced due to wear on one of the lobes. The diagnosis and findings determined the carbs were flooding and washing down the cylinder walls and essentially and obviously removing the lubricating properties of the oil, causing the engine issues and excessive oil consumption. The moral of the story is the fuel issues can really damage and ultimately destroy a perfectly good engine. Luckily for me I did not drive the car extensively, so the motor was very easy to rebuild and still in fairly good shape, but it could have been a lot worse. I would recommend simply avoiding the tripower set ups if you are not professionally judging and showing the car, because they really are problematic, even the factory original ones. I have a factory original set up now....and the original tri power manifold which I will keep with the car, but will keep my edelbrock setup on it which I have hidden with an original factory 4 bbl aircleaner....lucky for me the car was also sold with a four barrel so it has some correctness to it....lesson learned.
