She ran strong, good to work that oil through since I just changed it. But the water pump is shot; one will be coming in, on order. Good thing to find out before you get ready to road test her though. Also you get that lovely water spray everywhere, that happened to leave white residue on everything in my garage. But the old one is about off, waiting to be replaced.
I have an exhaust to start piecing together. I haven’t decided what kind of system yet, thrush tubes, turbo muffler, just no stainless steel resonator that will make it sound like a moped though. I don’t care what people think is cool.
But I got the front calipers on, need to bleed them. I got my suspicion that a front brake line is leaking too, I’ll find out when I bleed them if I see any drips. Knowing my luck the worst possible, hard to get to, impossibly bent, line will be leaking.
She sounded strong though, loud of course, there is no exhaust, but the engine ran a lot better than it previously did. Well the dizzy isn’t flopping around so I expected an improvement. I'm sure the new lug made all the difference though.
There is a story to starting her though.
I got her together, good enough for a test fire, and cranked it. The occasional pop, but no fire. Hmmm, come to find out the fuel pump isn’t priming, still it isn’t but I haven’t funneled fuel into it, having to prime it manually at the carb. Figuring that out fuel pump will come later. But for now she is just tossed together to run, the pretting' up come later.
So I put gas in her carb, and still, pop . . . . pop. . . . crank and crank.
Well that sucks.
So the wife got home and I had her turn it over while after I loosened the distributor, after turning the distributor way back past TDC she started and ran like a champ. Then I underwent the major task of tightening the dizzy, which is a pain. So with that clamped down she purred, loud as all get out, but still a loud purr.
When the sticker says 8 degrees before TDC, it means it.
That made me happy. Fuel, spark, and time (besides having to prime the carb) and that car is a go. Now I am onto picking at the brakes, and the coolant system. New water pump is on order; the new radiator is out in the garage awaiting its installation.
Right now the choke is just kind of hanging out, it has no power, but still opens up which is concerning to me. I may end up killing it, it’s electric anyways, and putting a manual choke on. But then I have the whole idle stop floating cam therory goes out the window . . . maybe I’ll leave it and bend it so it starts tighter. No, no, I’ll find the wire; it’s off the oil sending unit, wherever that is. Once I find that though I may kill off the idiot light and run my own tach.
But she lives; right now she is in pieces again, awaiting that water pump. But once I get the water pump and radiator in,I have the exhaust to figure out and then clean up the wires, and put the new tach in, oh yeah and the front brakes bled at least. I may park her for a while and take a break.
So right now I am waiting on some parts, and have lots of things to do, like tach, brake work, still haven’ gotten to the rear end yet. It has new gas shocks and wheel cylinders in line at the very minimum. But once she is together, and all that I have left is cosmetics, I’ll have to shoot a vid of her running.
I do need to start picking up my tools, my entire tool box is all over my garage. Since 80% of the engine work is done I won’t need everything, I can go back to picking and choosing out of the drawers, versus let’s get everything out because I need standard and metric everything.
That’s the update, not a lot new, as the engine is the biggest task, I’m pretty happy with how it is going. I will be happier when she is road ready and I can start gutting the interior and doing some body work though.
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That's a a sweet ride! I just got done doing a water pump myself. Mine looks a lot like yours, but it has some AC stuff to get in the way. I'll have to post an engine shot on my blog. Good luck with your vette!
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