Btw, I never truly put my car 'to bed' for the winter. If I can get the time and dare braving the weather, I'll work on it, even drive it. Granted Boise doesn't really get a lot of snow.
I may not have mentioned that when I found the carbs gummed up in early September I also found all the DOT-5 fluid had leaked out of (apparently) the right, rear slave and hose. All parts were new 2 years ago and I found nothing wrong on the bench with the parts I removed. I am blaming myself for perhaps not tightening the fittings enough. We shall see. All is clean, dry, and tight now.
I fixed the brakes yesterday with new parts which allowed me to take the GT6 to fill up with ethanol-free this morning. We made the 8 mile round trip without incident with the exception of "1" hickup when accelerating away from the house.
The pump was VERY slow but I was happy to be there and filling up with 89 octane to which I added both traditional (red) Sta-Bil and ethanol treatment Sta-Bil (amber). Why bother with the ethanol treatment since I topped up with ethanol-free? Because there was 4 or more gallons of E10 in the car prior to today's fill up.
I will re-tune the carbs soon. Yesterday the timing was 13 BTDC at 1000 and the 87 octane gas gave me lots of pinging. Yesterday I retarded the timing to 10 BTDC at 1000 and while better, that's still not enough. The ethanol-free was 89 octane so I am fairly confident running 8 BTDC at 1000 will work well with the gas I now have.
Footnote: I checked our old factory manual for the timing settings. I expect the octane ratings quoted were the then common "RON" value as opposed to the lower average (RON + MON)/2 that we use today. Regardless, the factory manual said to use a static timing of 13 BTDC for 100 octane and 7 BTDC for "premium" (which at the time was probably close to 95 octane RON. I'll just experiment with the timing until I get a smooth quiet engine without pinging and knocking. If I have to be down on power to achieve it... so be it.
I'll drive the car on some local errands to work the fuel additives into all the nooks and crannies and restore confidence in both the brakes and fuel system. I will put the car to bed in October for winter. Wish me luck!
Doug L.
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