The car was running so well, I decided I needed to take it apart again!
Okay, I guess that’s not entirely accurate. The car was definitely running too rich. I was getting a pretty constant stream of smoke out of the tail pipe that was absolutely unburned fuel and a few minutes of idling and revving in the garage had the brand new plugs pretty black. While I suspect that I’m going to get at least a little smoke out the tail pipe from the oil that’s getting by the turbo seals, I don’t want to wash down the cylinders with quite that much fuel. And besides, if it’s running this well with an imperfect carb, how much better will it run after I’ve monkeyed with it?
I’ve got this carb kit and I’m going to figure out how to use it! I’ve taken the carb off and brought it with me to my in-laws so that I can work on it in my downtime here. When I give the throttle linkage a rapid push, I can see that the accelerator pump is gushing fuel into the chamber instead of spraying it. Every other rubber diaphragm that I’ve come across in this car has been failed, so it’s a good bet that this one is also failed and causing my problems.
Before heading out for the weekend, I also pulled the distributor out (after carefully marking it, of course) so I could remove the advance/retard mechanism from the bottom of it. Using a screwdriver, I bent the crimp back to get a look at the diaphragm and, no surprise, it has several cracks in it which is why it isn’t holding pressure. I don’t know how I’m going to go about fixing it quite yet, but that might just get some silicone spread over it to seal it up. That’s another thing to work on while we’re visiting relatives.
On the cosmetic front, I realized that each of the headlight brackets could only fit into one particular spot based on where the mounting studs are and where the adjuster screws are located. All of the headlights were bad – one of the low beams had a good high beam portion, but that was it – so I pulled them out and tossed them. Replacing the headlight bulbs requires the headlight trim to be removed, so before I go through all the work to get those installed, I’m going to go ahead and put four new bulbs in.
The last thing I did before leaving town was to check out the wiring for the cooling fan. As a worst-case scenario, I’ve got a couple wires with alligator clips on one end and spade connectors on the other that will connect to the cooling fan harness. So once the car is running, I can pop the hood, hook up the clips, and then have working fans. I’d like to maybe re-do that with a thicker wire and a fuse, though.