After the Buttonwillow race, I felt rather burned out and took several weeks off to do anything but car stuff. But after a gentle prod from Lemons HQ today, it's time to finish up this series...
Episode 23: The Home Stretch
With the engine back together, it was time to stuff it back in the car and see how it ran. It was now June 9th -- just a few short weeks left before the Buttonwillow race.
Richard came over with his pickup truck and hauled it the 30 miles to Bernie's yard, then stuck around while I attached the torque converter & bell housing, then helped me hoist the engine into the car. By that time it was noon and he had to leave. We agreed to meet the next morning to install the transmission, while I worked on finishing the engine installation. You wouldn't think that it would take very long, but there are a log of little things to do!
Sunday morning at 9:00 AM, Richard showed up again and we soon had the car up on the hoist in Bernie's well-equipped shop. With the experience gained from the previous transmission swap back in November, we had the entire job done and the car back outside by noon. There were still a ton of little things that had to be connected, which I spent the rest of the day doing.
The next evening it was ready to test. I thought things were going really well. I tested the compression and got the following (with oiled cylinder walls):
Cyl psi
1 - 135
2 - 135
3 - 145
4 - 152
5 - 140
6 - 150
Looking good!
I checked the point gap and double-checked the static timing. I also double-checked the firing order, which perfectly lined up with the lengths of spark plug wire.
But when I went to start it, it coughed and backfired, but would not start. Clearly something was wrong with the timing. I was certain the problem was not with the valve timing, given the compression readings. It was 7:30pm and I was tired from a bad day at work, so I gave up for the evening. What could be wrong?
At work the next day, little was accomplished as I exchanged emails with friends, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The consensus was that I had the distributor 180 degrees off. I convinced Richard to help me that evening. My instructions to him were to question every assumption and statement that I made. If I said the sky was blue, he should make me prove it.
We quickly checked the distributor and it was correctly oriented. Was the valve timing so bad that it wouldn't run? A quick test proved that it was close enough, if not perfect. We checked the firing order. It was correct. The point gap and dwell were within spec. Then it hit me: the spark plug wires were in the correct order, but only if the distributor were rotating backwards! It took only a minute to correct my blunder and the engine started and ran smoothly. An entire work session wasted because of a simple error!
The plan now was to drive the car home so I wouldn't have to waste 90 minutes each evening fighting rush hour traffic traffic. All remaining work could be done in my driveway. But only one headlight was working and I still hadn't made any test drives. Another day's delay.
The next evening was devoted to test drives up & down the street and fixing minor problems. But it seemed to be running worse with each test. Finally it simply wouldn't run at all, and I had to push it back into the lot. It wasn't getting any fuel. Twenty years of crud in the gas tank had finally totally plugged the gas line. With Bernie out of town, I didn't have access to his shop with compressed air, so I couldn't blow it out, and that would only be a temporary fix.
We decided that it were to be ready in time for Buttonwillow, the car needed to be in my driveway at home. It was now Friday, so bright & early the next morning I called AAA and asked for a tow home. It was certainly entertaining for the AAA operator when she asked what kind of car I had! 
Back home, I dropped the gas tank and discovered that emptying it via the drain plug still left almost a gallon in the tank. I won't dignify it by calling it gas -- it was a horrible orange semi-fluid with lots of slime and solids in it.
A radiator shop 15 miles away advertised that they repaired gas tanks, and they would be open for another hour. Off I went!
The place turned out to be a snapshot out of time. The owner's father had built it in 1938, and little had changed since then. You could not get permits today to operate it in Los Angeles county. It wasn't just grandfathered in, it was great-grandfathered! There were antiques everywhere, both outside and inside the shop.
The owner was a real character too, looking like Santa Claus and telling the funniest stories. For an unassuming little shop, he had some high-end clients. He showed me radiators he was working on for Jay Leno and for the Nethercutt Collection.
He dumped my gas tank into a vat of vile chemicals he said were a close cousin of Easy-Off oven cleaner and told me to come back on Sunday afternoon.
When I returned the next day, he showed me the tank and told me the bad news: removing the crud has exposed a mass of pinhole leaks in the very bottom of the tank. It would have to be soldered before it would hold gas. For whatever reason, perhaps because I told him good stories about Lemons racing, or was paying him in cash, he agreed to move it ahead of other jobs and have it done in two days. Meanwhile, I could continue work on the ever-growing list of tasks.
I was keeping a list of to-do tasks on the computer, printing it at the start of every work session, after adding my hand written notes from the previous day. The list kept getting longer rather than shorter. To keep up my moral, I moved each item to a "done" list as I completed each one. By the day I left for the track, that list filled an entire page, but the to-do section had finally shrunk to just a few lines.
The gas tank repairs looked good, but the solder didn't completely fill one hole. Rather than take it out of the car and have it re-soldered, I opted for a quick fix with JB Weld. What would we do without that stuff?
The car now started and ran again. But little did I know that some of the crud had gotten past the filters and would cause us no end of grief at the track.
By now I was racing home every day after work, changing clothes, and working until late in the evening. Every lunch hour was spent running errands to auto and hardware stores -- bolts, fiber washers, hoses, filters and electrical connectors. Would I be done in time?
Next: Off To The Races!
"I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!"
IOE winner in the Super Snipe -- Buttonwillow 2012
IOE winner in Super Snipe v2.0 -- Buttonwillow 2016
"Every Super Snipe in Lemons has won an IOE!"
For the time being, I have to do this from work.