I have inherited my Grandfather's 1954 Studebaker 3R6 Pickup, with a 245 inline 6 cylinder "L head" (valves on the side) engine, oil bath air cleaner, draft tube instead of PVC, generator and mechanical voltage regulator instead of altenator, and of course, those wonders of ingenuity, the carburator and point distributor.

It's like a piece of alien technology, a complete learning process for me :)

Oh, and it get 20 miles to the gallon as well.

BTW, the reason that older carburated cars dislike starting in the cold is that Gasoline dosen't vaporise when cold, and gasoline engines depend on engine heat to fully vaporise the fuel.

This is still true of injected engines, but since the fuel is injected directly into the cylinder, it dosn't take nearly as much time to heat the cylinder and vaporise the gasoline, thus the real benefit of feul injection, reduced emmisions.

Actually, all EFI systems I've seen inject the gas into the intake air stream, not directly into the cylinder. Most seemed to be set up so the gasoline droplets hit the backside of the intake valve, so, yes, cylinder heat to vaporize the gas - and you get to use heat of vaporization to keep the intake valve cooler. Of course, the heat problem is not the intake but the exhaust. Oh - and I think the EFI "pulses" (as opposed to the MFI metered stream) helps with vaporization as well.
There are engines that inject fuel directly into the cylinder - they're called diesels. :)

Oh - an 'L' head! Cool! You may be able to improve efficiency a bit by increasing compression (those motors were built for really bad gas). You won't be able to do much of this because it's a side valve, so there's a lot of combustion area that isn't directly over the piston. I think these motors had the exhaust valves dumping into a common manifold. You can increase performance by replacing this with individual pipes, even if they're not tuned headers. I've never worked on one (bike guy) but have dealt with side valve engines...

Your right, I sorta goofed, multi-port fuel injection systems usually have a fuel injector for each cylinder, usually located so that they spray right at the intake valve (which should be open, or something is pooched), not directly into the cylinder.

As far as the Stude is goes, there are after market performance aluminium heads STILL available for the 245.5 L-Head Commander engines, not to mention that you can still find the aftermarket intake and exhaust headers.

I had briefly considered putting a modern V6 Drivetrain in, but the '54 Studebakers are pretty rare (what with '54 being one of the lowest selling years in the history of Studebaker), so I'm opting for the first total rebuild of this engine since 1967 :)

Another interesting tidbit is that Studebaker's don't seen have the problem of valve seat erosion when running on modern gasolines that seems to plague their contemporaries (something to do with the unusually high nickle content in the steel if i remember correctly).

But the real killer with modern gasolines on older cars is vapor lock. I seems that modern gasolines vaporise at a much much lower temperature then what those older cars were designed for.

Heh, I know someone who (to swing back to a procooling related direction) uses a peltier assembly to cool his fuel to prevent the gas from boiling in the lines and vaporlocking his Lark.

my first car out of the Navy was a '42 MB (aka Jeep) with an L head 4, once drove it for 45mi with 2 bad con rod bearings
the noise of those pistons slamming into the head was unbelievable
but it got me home (from duck hunting, the good ol' days)