I’ve been spending time cosmetically refinishing the engine bay (and fixing a few things discovered along the way), clamps, component paint refinishing, shining and polishing, and significantly, repainting the driver’s side engine block black and sending out the exhaust manifolds for Cerakote, glacier black at Bonehead Performance. They also welded a couple of cracks they found. The black frame/firewall will have to stay until an engine pull, if ever, as will the right side block only be repainted black if I have to pull the intake. Not so awful with my dark green opalescent.
Craziest thing too. It was about a three week interval between removing the exhaust manifolds and reinstalling them. Car ran fine before I pulled them. When I started the car after the reinstall, things didn’t go well. It didn’t want to start, and when it did ran at 2000 rpm, choke or no choke. WTF!? Figured a vacuum leak from changing to braided hoses. Tested by closing off the vacuum port at the intake, no difference. Butterflies seemed to be closing and I was busting my brain trying to figure out what I did in three weeks of poking around the engine to screw it up. Decided it had to be carb and after staring at them for a bit I decided to check the clearance of the fast idle screw to the butterfly lever with a feeler gauge. Rear and middle fine, front…she won’t go in. In fact, it was two full turns or more to get clearance. Reset the clearance, reset the linkage and all was well. Now how did that screw get turned in two turns or more in a stationary car when I know I didn’t touch it? I’m mystified, but happy it’s fixed.
I thought of that, but it wasn’t the exhaust. It definitely was the fast idle screw significantly holding open the front carb butterfly.
I went out to give it all a good look and try and understand what happened. Tom D suggested to me privately that perhaps something hung up and then let go.
I thought about it and looked closely, lo and behold, I now have a large gap between the screw and the butterfly lever, the same amount I screwed it out. My conclusion: somehow in all the messing around, don’t ask me how, the cam got off kilter on the shoe that pulls down the fast idle screw which did not let it return to “home” position. I compensated by adjusting the screw. After that, the cam (with using the choke and running the car probably) fell back into place in the shoe and hence left me with the large gap I just saw. I verified the shoe and cam are properly aligned and reset the screw again. To me, this is the only explanation that makes sense. All the butterflies are closing completely with the choke off and there is the requisite ever so slight gap to the fast idle screw.
This one’s a driver with plenty o’ patina – trying to preserve originality as much as possible, repairing PO’s mistakes and replacing or repainting only what’s necessary.
