Dave no doubt but is the carb heat plumbing harder than the
    whole F/I setup? What I'm trying to do is look at systems in
    general.
    Less systems with less plumbing equals more reliability (I think)?

    Tony

The thing everyone is forgetting is that the reliability of ems and efi
are well developed for auto use. The Subaru engine management system is
operating at six sigma reliability levels. If we keep to already
established efi designs efi should be at least as reliable as any other
system. The problems of carbs are icing, vapor lock, fuel boiling,
overflow due to bad or fouled float valves. EFI can also suffer several
of these problems, but once done correctly should be VERY reliable. EFI
can also improve range with better fuel control. Planning prior to
building should eliminate the plumbing problems.

I think we are throwing
out the baby with the bathwater.

Some magnetos have trouble firing engines that have high cycle
rates. (operate at high RPM) I am not sure if this is caused by coil
saturation of rise time. When I worked at Kawasaki there were several
bikes built with standard aircraft mags for running at Bonneville. The
reason is obvious, run a mag and no battery is needed, and things should
be lighter. ALL of the bikes had problems with high RPM misfire. It took
quite a while before anyone would believe the mags didn't work at high
RPM. Finally one of the engineers removed the mag and put in a points
system running total-loss batery system. All high RPM misfire
dissapeared and the effort continued.

I don't know if more modern mags
would have this problem or not. Remember even the latest aircraft
engines rarely operate as high as 3000 RPM.
FWIW
Bill Jepson



Bill check out MSD mags.
Paul Lamar ...No rotor no motor.

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