A lot has happened since I last posted here. The power steering is fixed. I took the new pump out of the the housing and put it in my housing. As soon as I started the car I could hear it whining. After I turned the wheel back and forth a few times it started to quiet down and eventually went away. Problem solved, finally! I'm getting a leak from the high pressure line at the pump so I don't think it's sealing. The housing was a bit chewed up around the hole and I tried to smooth it out the best I could to get a good seal. It got better but I'm still leaking.
Since I finally had steering I was able to get it out on the road and do some test driving. I had some idle issues to straighten out. This wasn't as easy as adjusting mixing screws mainly because they didn't work. I don't know how many times I pulled the carb to try to figure out why. I got some help from Cliff and he suggested opening up the pick up tubes, DCR's, and air bypass. That didn't do much. Then someone pointed out that I had holes in the throttle blades which I shouldn't have since I have the air bypass, so I ordered new blades without holes. With the little knowledge I have with Qjets I started unscrewing the blades and the screw heads all popped off and I couldn't get the rest out of the holes so they were going to have to be drilled out, tapped, and larger screws used. Or I needed a hole new assembly which didn't look like it was going to be cheap. I saw some on ebay that looked ok but I wasn't sure and didn't want to take the chance. Then I saw new ones somewhere but they were around $100! I talked to Paul Carter to see if he had any assemblies laying around. He didn't but he had 2 Qjets laying around. One service model with no numbers, and one off a 455 Pontiac. I took the Pontiac for $100 and started digging in to it to replace the old parts with the new ones from my rebuild. It was a mess inside and I'm not talking about a dirty mess, I'm talking hack job mess. 2 main issues were threads. One base plate hole on the bottom of the body was completely stripped. Someone threw some helicoil in there but put the coil in the base plate instead of the body which made no sense to me. When they tried to screw in the screw they used so much force that the coil pushed it's way into the body essentially bridging the gap between the 2 and locking them together. The same thing happened to the threads for the needle valve. There was helicoil in there that was coming apart. I noticed some wire hanging through the fuel inlet when I went to change the fitting. I grabbed my needle nose to grab it and it wouldn't come out so I took the needle valve and seat out and found the helicoil. What a mess. Paul swapped it for the service model that he had on his 428 LeMans and it worked good. I got some new jets and metering rods from Cliff, a new choke and float, and took some of the parts from my carb and threw it on last night. While all that was going on with the carb I decided to pull the plugs because I knew they would be fowled from running rich. They were covered in black soot so I cleaned them off. I found one gap was almost closed. I must have bumped it or something. Since I also rebuilt my distributor with a higher output coil I opened the gaps to 40. I started tuning it again and reset the timing at 14 base, vacuum advance advances it to 24 and total timing is around 32-34. It's idling nice and smooth at 900. It's not running rich anymore and that smell is very minimal, I don't think it will ever be completely gone with my cam but I finally got it to where it should be!
10-10-2018, 10:50 AM
Hybrid Mode
