Well, like many of you, thanks to Photo Bucket, all our pictures are no longer viewable. Hopefully, we will all be able to edit our threads at some point in the future, but for now, our son set us up with a photo storage site that will work. It will cost us $5 per month for the service, but since we are paying for it, I am pretty sure that it can’t be taken away from us at the drop of a hat. That said, back to the build thread!
After rolling about 130 miles, performance began to deteriorate. I found myself wondering if I had miscounted the number of chain pins on the timing chain when I installed it. Thing is, why would this cause it to go from running great, to loosing power in just 130 miles? Plus, the vacuum had been steadily dropping. This is what actually precipitated trouble shooting since the power brakes were getting worse and worse.
I did the propane enrichment to find a vacuum leak with no success.
I was ready to pull the radiator and take the timing cover off to check, but just as I was about to do this, I decided to do a smoke test to locate any possible vacuum leaks. I should first of all mention that I installed an Edelbrock 4 barrel manifold so that switching to EFI in the future, should we decide to do so, would be possible. I wanted to keep the MC2100 2 barrel carburetor for the time being, so I had to do the opposite of what everyone does, ie, adapting a 2 barrel to a 4 barrel manifold instead of the other way around.
There was some smoke coming from the throttle plate shaft, but not a lot. It was kind of hard to see exactly where the leak was, so I removed the carburetor and adapter plate.
Obviously, from where the soot is, there were significant leaks under the adapter.
I took a straight edge and a feeler gauge and discovered that the adapter was .004” warped. I called Summit Racing and told them of the problem, and they told me that the plate was under warranty, and that they would send me a new one. They told me to keep the old one, so I decided to remove the warp and try it out.
No luck! I still had a huge vacuum leak. Then, quite by accident, I was looking down into the manifold with the carburetor removed, and noticed daylight coming from inside the manifold!
Although Summit told me that this was the adapter to mount my 2 barrel on a 4 barrel manifold, it’s not! At each corner, where the bolts would normally go to bolt the adapter to a 2 barrel manifold, there was nothing but gasket, nothing sandwiching the gasket.
Kind of looked like I had 3 options.
#1 Buy the EFI right now, (6 to 8 week wait, plus our own empty pockets after all the other things that we just did) $1000 to $1200
#2 Buy a 4 barrel carburetor, try to run it with a stock cam, then sell the carburetor at a loss if we decide to go EFI next year. $500 to $600
#3 Make an adapter for the adapter $3
#3 it is! I picked up a piece of 1/4” aluminum and kind of hand machined it.
After cutting, drilling, and filing, I made sure that the adapter was flat by using several grades of emery cloth glued to a piece of heavy, perfectly flat marble.
The end result was an adapter that was within .001” of flat. Good enough for my purposes.
I put it on the engine under the 2 to 4 barrel adapter and fired er up.
The vacuum went from 12” to 13” of vacuum at 1000RPM to 21” to 22” of vacuum. It may look like a wedding layer cake under the carburetor, LOL, ie,carburetor, insulator, 2 to 4 adapter, adapter for the adapter but it works! If anyone asks, I’ll just tell them that it’s a tunnel ram!
Thanks to 007 for providing us with his old carburetor. Using parts from another carb that we had, we were able to build one good one from 2. We owe you a cold one!
I pumped the accelerator with my hand a few times, (no seats in yet) and turned the key..................NOTHING!!
I just charged the battery, and it was up to full charge. I hooked up my starter button leads to the solenoid and the engine jumped to life! Phew! Shut it off and it would not start again with the key, only by jumping the solenoid. We have to take a couple of horses to the vet today, so we will have at it when we get back.
All that we have to do now is find out where it belongs among the spider web of wires under the dash.
:bounce::jeeplove:
