I re-installed the fuel tank today with the new fit­tings, and it is finally sealed.  I put about 12 gal­lons of fuel in and every­thing is tight with no leaks.  Mov­ing on, I tem­porar­ily installed the bat­tery tray, put in a new bat­tery, con­nected all of the cables and pow­ered up all of the elec­tri­cal sys­tems which thank­fully appear to be oper­at­ing correctly.

I installed the new plug wire set, con­nected every­thing and the only thing left is to install the spark plugs.  Next step was to crank her over to prime the fuel sys­tem.  What I thought would take a cou­ple of min­utes of crank­ing took only about 45 sec­onds to get the fuel from the tank to the carb.  Unfor­tu­nately it was at this point that today’s prob­lem reared its ugly head.…..

With the fuel sys­tem pres­sur­ized the fuel fil­ter is leak­ing like a sieve.  Pre­vi­ously, I had taken the time to dis­as­sem­ble the glass bowl fil­ter, clean it and the ceramic fil­ter ele­ment and put it back in, but appar­ently the gas­ket is dried out and not mak­ing a proper seal, so had to call it a day.  With fuel sprayed on the top of the motor I was tak­ing no chances that a spark would light the beast on fire.

At this point, I need to either re-gasket the old fil­ter (the method I pre­fer) or scrap it and just install an in-line fil­ter between the fuel pump and the carb, either way will require me to remove and re-install that fuel line.  I will do a lit­tle leg work tomor­row to fig­ure it out.  If I can find some nitrile rub­ber stock I will just make my own gas­ket, if not, I’ll just have to punt.  We are about 1″ from start-up, while I can’t wait to hear her run, I need to make sure every­thing is per­fect before doing so, tomor­row is another day.

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With visions of hear­ing her finally roar to life Paul and I came in this morn­ing, put 6 gal­lons of fuel in the tank and got busy check­ing minor details and then I smelled gas fumes.  The fuel tank was leak­ing at the con­nec­tion to the fuel line.  What we thought would be just a loose line con­nec­tion took the rest of the day with­out a good res­o­lu­tion.  So no start up today…

I can’t be sure, but I think there is a fit­ting miss­ing from the tank itself.  Much ear­lier we installed a new stain­less steel fuel line and it seemed to fit per­fectly into the tank.  The prob­lem seems to be that when the nut on the line is turned down into the fit­ting, the head of the nut shoul­ders on to the tank before a good com­pres­sion seal can be made allow­ing a very small leak that drips fuel.  We spent hours try­ing to solve this issue.….

At first I thought the flare on the new line had been dam­aged, so we re-flared it and tried again to no avail, with the tank in the car it is hard to really see what is hap­pen­ing.  We tried installing new and dif­fer­ent fit­tings and all of them seemed to have the same prob­lem, they would shoul­der on the tank before mak­ing a seal.  With no other options, we took the tank back out of the car and I still can­not get over the fact that the tank drain is not on the low­est point.  There is no way to com­pletely drain the tank by pulling the plug which is a bout 2 inches above the bottom.

Once out we are able to bet­ter visu­ally inspect the tank fit­ting.  It seems that it is not a com­pres­sion fit­ting at all, what we see is a fit­ting that has a pipe flared on one end inserted into the bot­tom of the tank to pick up the fuel from the bot­tom, so we are attempt­ing to mate two flared pipe ends together.  What I need is a fit­ting with a bul­let tip that is tub­ing thread that can insert into the tank fit­ting and com­press the flared pipe that is in there seal­ing it and then find a way to go from that fit­ting to a stan­dard 5/16″ com­pres­sion fit­ting so that the fuel line can attach to that.  If these fit­tings are not avail­able, the only other solu­tion will be to take the tank to some­one to have a new mod­ern fit­ting either welded or sol­dered into the tank.….

On the way home I stopped in at NAPA and Lonny and I spent 30 min­utes try­ing to resolve the issue going through box after box of fit­tings.  We finally found what may be a work­able solu­tion.  These guys at NAPA really rock, when I went to pay him, he told me to “have a nice day” and would not take any money.  The only bright spot to a really crappy day.

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I’m back to work on the “Gray Lady” after a ten day break.  Other than a few min­utes here and there most of my time has been involved in try­ing to re-hab a rental unit and get it ready for Decem­ber 1st.  Unfor­tu­nately, after 12 gal­lons of paint I am still not fin­ished (with 1 room left to go) and the floor­ing contractor’s can­not get there until Decem­ber 2, too much left to do and to lit­tle time to do it so the dead­line has been moved to Jan­u­ary 1st.  That being said, I put the paint brush aside and went back to the car with the hope that I could get her started this weekend.

While on hia­tus my needed parts arrived.  The new gas cap arrived from Baily’s Garage, and Cadil­lac Inter­na­tional was very good about hav­ing a new pipe bent to replace the left rear inter­me­di­ate pipe that would not fit on our last go round and finally CB Per­for­mance shipped the dis­trib­u­tor kit with a new flamethrower coil that had been back-ordered for the last 2 weeks.

Paul had the day off and came in to give me a hand, while he was fin­ish­ing up the exhaust, I worked on the dis­trib­u­tor con­ver­sion to elim­i­nate the points and install the elec­tronic mod­ule under the cap.  The kit fit per­fectly, but there was a prob­lem with some slop in the shaft that allowed it to float up and down to much.  The kit requires tol­er­ances of no less that .010 to no more than .060 between the sen­sor and the mag­net plate under the rotor.  My friends down at NAPA auto parts helped me to solve the prob­lem by grind­ing out the pin hold­ing the gear, pulling the shaft, inspect­ing the bush­ings and then installing 2 shim wash­ers between the top of the gear and the bot­tom of the shaft tube.  Now it is per­fect with a con­sis­tent tol­er­ance of .030 and no slop so I installed it on the engine.

With that piece of the puz­zle fin­ished, the last item we need to con­nect is the tranny cool­ing lines.  Ear­lier and with great dif­fi­culty we had installed them, guess­ing at their proper loca­tion and it turns out we guessed wrong.  Think­ing back, it would have been smarter to install them before we hoisted the engine back in place, but we live and learn.  Not sure about the loca­tion, I went back to the ref­er­ence pho­tos I took when tak­ing every­thing apart, armed with this new info, we took them back out and re-installed them in the cor­rect posi­tion.  Then I made up two new rub­ber lines to con­nect the tranny set to the the lines com­ing from the radi­a­tor itself.  Stick a fork in us, we are done, all sys­tems are closed, oil is in, tranny fluid filled, power steer­ing fluid in, coolant in and we are nearly ready to start her up, hope­fully tomorrow.

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We began from the man­i­fold on the driver’s side (now that the man­i­fold issue has been cor­rected) to the muf­fler, then through the x part of the frame.  All the while rebuild­ing the hang­ers as we went, all is well to a point.  Now with the last large piece that goes up and over the rear axle (allow­ing the axle to float) on its way to the res­onator we again have a prob­lem.  I can only assume that the piece is bent incor­rectly, the large U-shape bend is closed to much allow­ing the pipe to rub the rear wheel and poten­tially also hit the lower mount for the shock.  The parts are not inter-changeable so I am con­fi­dent we have every­thing in the right place and when we loose fit the sys­tem we did not see the prob­lem.  We are in the cor­rect place above the axle, but in the wrong place below it.

With it being Sun­day there is not much else we can do.  I don’t have a pipe ben­der and I’m pretty sure if I try to open up that bend with­out one I will kink the pipe and restrict it.  I will try to cor­rect it next week and if I am not able to open it up, I will have to talk to them over at Cadil­lac Inter­na­tional about a replace­ment.  We are 16 man hours into the exhaust and still not completed.

We installed the radi­a­tor sup­port frame, the new radi­a­tor, hoses and heater core lines along with a new ther­mo­stat.  I wanted to be able to start-up with­out the fend­ers on so that we would have more room to work on any adjust­ments and be able to send the car out for an align­ment before we close every­thing in.  How­ever, that sup­port frame is attached with only one bolt at the base and kind of floats there, it is actu­ally the fend­ers and splash pan­els that sta­bi­lize it and now I am wor­ried about try­ing to start-up with it not secured, there is not a lot of clear­ance between the radi­a­tor and cool­ing fan.  I decided to fab­ri­cate two tem­po­rary sup­ports that run from the sup­port frame to the front of the frame where the bumper brack­ets mount.…. Prob­lem solved and we are good to go now.

Now another prob­lem, with the radi­a­tor up, we can see that the tranny cool­ing lines are in the wrong place.  They will have to be pulled out  re-routed and re-installed cor­rectly so that they will meet up with the front set that goes through the radi­a­tor sup­port frame.  Once that is done, we will install 2 new hoses to con­nect the two orig­i­nal metal tubes, and will fab­ri­cate them in the shop to close that part of the sys­tem.  The only things keep­ing us from start-up now are the com­ple­tion of the exhaust sys­tem and instal­la­tion of the dis­trib­u­tor and coil (we are wait­ing on parts for those).

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We began assem­bly and instal­la­tion down the pas­sen­ger side of the vehi­cle now that we have the flanges.  We took a con­sid­er­able amount of time mak­ing sure every­thing was just per­fect.  As we got to every hanger, we pulled it down cleaned the metal parts and installed new rub­ber that we cus­tom made in the shop using the old ones as pat­terns.  The only dif­fer­ence between the orig­i­nals and ours is they were riv­eted together and instead are now bolted.  The sys­tem ordered from Cadil­lac Inter­na­tional appears to be of very high qual­ity and every junc­tion lines up at a hanger just as it is sup­posed to.  The pas­sen­ger side is now com­plete and rock solid.  Amaz­ing factoid.…it took 9 muf­fler clamps to assem­ble just that one side, from the man­i­fold to the muf­fler, to the res­onator and then out to the tailpipe.

Now for the driver’s side, the real fun begins.….. Here we have not only the exhaust flange but the heat con­trol diverter valve, plus 2 gas­kets.  Well it seems the new flanges are much thicker than the orig­i­nals and now the man­i­fold studs are not long enough to get the nuts to grab.  No way around it, the studs have to come out and be replaced.  The first one came out easy as  pie and we then spent an hour try­ing to remove the sec­ond one (Murphy’s Law strikes again!).  We finally decided the only way to get it out was going to be to remove the man­i­fold (and ruin the new gas­kets),  I was sure we were going to break it off and have to send the man­i­fold out to be drilled and tapped.  Once on the bench in a vise and with a pipe wrench it finally gave way and came out.  New studs are in and the man­i­fold is re-installed and finally we are ready to go.  Time to call it a day.

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Well when time per­mit­ted over the last 2 weeks, when not fight­ing our com­puter virus, we have been busy assem­bling the exter­nal engine parts.  We now have installed the power steer­ing pump, water pump, oil fil­ter can­is­ter, fuel pump, oil switch and coolant tem­per­a­ture sen­sor.  All are now wired and plumbed cor­rectly.  The gen­er­a­tor and starter are in and con­nected along with the fan belts.  We also installed the car­bu­re­tor, which is back from a com­plete re-build and put in the fuel line from the fuel pump to the carb.  We are almost ready to go.

We also spent much time installing the exhaust man­i­folds.  When we opened the exhaust sys­tem boxes we real­ized that no flanges were included to attach to the man­i­folds, we had to get a pair of those.  It took bet­ter than an hour to route the tranny cool­ing lines up through to where the radi­a­tor will be.

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   Spent most of the day Sun­day and today tweak­ing the engine and tranny, set­ting the mounts and mak­ing sure every­thing was aligned.  It took quite some time, but finally I was happy with it, every­thing looks and seems square, we installed the exhaust man­i­folds, water pump and fan and then spent hours try­ing to loose fit the new exhaust sys­tem.  What a jig saw puz­zle that is, a box full of pre-bent pipe, two muf­flers and two res­onators.  I think we finally have the cor­rect lay­out and we have it tacked in with the muf­fler clamps and will secure it once and for all when I am con­fi­dent that it is per­fect.  Now comes the detail work, I’ll spend the rest of the week mount­ing the oil fil­ter, power steer­ing pump, fuel fil­ter, fuel pump, gen­er­a­tor and starter.  We are get­ting close to the day that we can finally roll her over and hear her purr…

   After much debate, we finally sent the Rochester 4 bar­rel carb out to a local guy who likes to work on this kind of stuff.  I’m sure it needs a very good clean­ing and after every­thing else we have done a full re-build won’t hurt, when it is ready later in the week, we’ll get that installed too.……

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