First there was no compression. A little history: Months ago after prepping the engine for "First Fire", I had the horror of seeing coolant leaking out from all around the cylinder head. Why? Because somehow a late MK3 head gasket with the raised lip had been installed in a MK2 engine (sigh). Of course, prior to that, all the valves had been adjusted with atom-splitting accuracy. Did I re-adjust the valves after the proper, thinner head gasket was installed? Why, of course not. So none of the valves were closing – at all! (just shoot me).
OK, valves got adjusted. Did another compression check. Pretty scary – they ranged from 115 to 65(!) PSI. But it’s a completely rebuilt engine, so I’m hoping after things seat a bit, the compression will come back up to where it should be.
Electric Fuel Pump - ON .... Leaks all over the place! After obvious tightenings and a liberal use of Teflon tape we were down to one carburetor float valve. Fixed that, and then the "other" two carbs started taking turns at who’s float valve would leak next. Apparently they were playing musical float valves amongst themselves, and since the leaks were not much more than drips that fell onto nothing hot, I said “screw it” – let’s go.
Ignition - ON ..... Poof! There goes a Jacobs high performance coil – up in smoke. This was odd, since the system had been previously energized to static time the distributor. Oh well, I was never sure if the Jacobs would work without the associated Jacobs computer box. So on went an Accel High performance coil.
Ignition - ON ..... POOF! The Accel goes up in smoke as well and blew molten epoxy all over my brand new, custom fitted, 8.8 mm, pretty yellow Accel spark plug wires. I was never sure whether that coil was a 12 or 6 volt variant so I thought that might be the problem. However, it turned out that the little ground wire inside the distributor had shorted against the points output to the condenser. So after blowing-up $100+ of HP coils, off to the parts store I went to buy the cheapest friggin’, plain old 12 volt coil available and a new condenser (just in case)….. (and it “was” the case – just amazing).
All that sorted out, and the engine still wouldn’t fire. It seems some Rocket Scientist (yes – I have a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering) had the ignition wires 180 degrees out of phase! I can't tell you how many times I hand-turned that crankshaft, watching all the little rocker arms going up and down to "positively" identify the #1 compression stroke. (....groan). I'm going to join Opus Dei so the self-flagellation won't get me thrown in the looney bin.
Hours and hours after we started this effort .... the Franken-6 springs to life! And to tell you the truth, despite the triple CD150s, untried S2 cam and 6-into-1 header, she runs pretty damn good too. It takes a little longer to sync 3 carbs; the ignition still seems a bit too advanced; and she needs to be leaned out some more, but all in all I am ecstatic! Especially when you consider that she was built and modified from parts out of five separate cars from THREE different manufacturers!
Dr. F. would be proud, ....awwww
In two weeks, the tub goes on. Oh my.....
Thank you for all your help, over all these years!
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