Well, the gifts are wrapped, the tree is trimmed, the gin­ger­bread house is done and the dog (Wyatt) is back from the groomer with his jin­gle bell col­lar on, so with lit­tle else to do I went over to the shop and trial fit the new alter­na­tor this morn­ing.  It really was a sim­ple install, I pur­chased a Delco 10 si 63 amp alter­na­tor, pulled the gen­er­a­tor, dis­con­nected the wires from the volt­age reg­u­la­tor and began.

I reversed the gen­er­a­tor mount 180 degrees bought a 3″ 3/8″ bolt and put it in.  It was out of line so I shimmed it out with 6 wash­ers and bingo it was lined up.  The adjust­ing arm needed to be shimmed out from the water pump too, I used the old belt ten­sioned it up, used a no. 4 cable from the out­put to the bat­tery ter­mi­nal and I was ready to go.  I just capped off the orig­i­nal wires and taped them into the har­ness, leav­ing the old volt­age reg­u­la­tor mounted with noth­ing con­nected to it, so it will be easy to reverse every­thing should I decide to down the road.

Started her up and she was run­ning a solid 14+ volts at idle, should work out very well and deal a lot less aggra­va­tion in the future.  Now that I know every­thing is prop­erly aligned and func­tion­ing, I will dress it up by mak­ing some spac­ers to take the place of the wash­ers and I have also ordered a 2 wire plug to fit the alter­na­tor so that I can wire it in to the gen­er­a­tor light and have a fully func­tion­ing unit with­out all of the gen­er­a­tor headaches.

Stick a fork in me, I’m done.…. Time to cel­e­brate!  Have a very Merry Christ­mas and I sin­cerely hope Santa brings every­thing you really want (notice I didn’t say need, because we all def­i­nitely want more than we need.….lol).

Until next week.….……

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Got her up and run­ning again this morn­ing to check what I thought was a minor exhaust man­i­fold leak, and it turns out that we do have one, not from the man­i­fold itself, but because we neglected to install the man­i­fold heat tube that goes up to the choke assem­bly.  I ran her for a solid 30 min­utes and every­thing checks out just fine.  As noted ear­lier, we do have a prob­lem with the gen­er­a­tor mak­ing a racket and not charg­ing.  Every­thing seems to be solid and tight, with no leaks, oil that is, my newly built radi­a­tor is leaking.…eeekkk.  In fair­ness, it is very minor and while I can­not locate the source, it is com­ing from the lower left cor­ner, there are no fit­tings or hoses in the area so I sus­pect a pin­hole in the sol­der joint attach­ing the lower tank to the core.  So it will have to come out and go back to the shop for pres­sure test­ing and repair.

Exclud­ing the radi­a­tor, and gen­er­a­tor the only other issue I have is a baf­fling sit­u­a­tion with the dis­trib­u­tor again.  I set the tim­ing per­fectly, tighten it down and within min­utes it backs off and dis­rupts the tim­ing to the point where she stalls.  Right now, the only way I can keep her run­ning is to put a wood block between the intake man­i­fold and the vac­uum advance on the dis­trib­u­tor to keep it from turn­ing back.  When the dis­trib­u­tor is out, the shaft turns freely with no resis­tance so I guess I have no choice but to pull it out and dis­as­sem­ble it com­pletely, some­thing is bind­ing up and caus­ing the whole assem­bly to turn even with the hold-down wrenched down tightly.  I have no clue right now.…

After some seri­ous thought and because our goal is to have a reli­able daily dri­ver I’ve decided to scrap the gen­er­a­tor and volt­age reg­u­la­tor in favor of a one wire Delco 10 si alter­na­tor rated at 63 amps.  When I picked up the car, there were at least 4 new and used volt­age reg­u­la­tors in the trunk indi­cat­ing a con­stant and chronic issue with the sys­tem and frankly I want to enjoy the car and not keep tin­ker­ing with it when it is done.  I will how­ever have the orig­i­nal gen set rebuilt and put it on the shelf, should I decide to put it back in later.  This set-up should sup­ply plenty of juice to keep every­thing run­ning and fully charged even with long peri­ods of idle.

While run­ning the car today and with it up on jack­stands we ran the whole dri­ve­train for quite some time.  Every­thing checks out nice, with no noises or vibra­tions from the tranny, dri­ve­shaft or rear end, either in for­ward or reverse.  No exhaust rat­tles, leaks or issues of any kind

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All of the hard work came together this morn­ing when I once again pulled the dis­trib­u­tor and cor­rected its instal­la­tion, re-installed the plugs, changed her oil, gave her a shot of start­ing fluid and BOOM off she went sput­ter­ing and snort­ing, pop­ping, and back­fir­ing.  Nat­u­rally after sleep­ing for decades no one expected her to awaken with a smile, but she is awake.  Admit­tedly, I shut her down after about 20 sec­onds amidst the unex­pected noise.

I made some minor car­bu­re­tor and tim­ing adjust­ments, started again and she smoothed out dra­mat­i­cally but there are some weird and scary noises com­ing from the front end, so I shut her back down again.  I didn’t think any of the noises were com­ing from the engine itself so I removed the power steer­ing and gen­er­a­tor belts, re-started and the noises were now gone indi­cat­ing pos­si­ble bear­ing issues in either the gen­er­a­tor or power steer­ing pump.  Again, I shut her back down, because with­out the belts the water pump was not turn­ing and I was not going to take a chance of her overheating.

I put the power steer­ing pump belt back on, re-started again and this time she ran qui­etly at a fast idle for about 20 min­utes until she came up to nor­mal oper­at­ing tem­per­a­ture.  Seems like the noise was com­ing from the gen­er­a­tor and I will have to check it out later.  She ran smooth, solid and with­out so much as a hic­cup and over­all I’m just tick­led pink.…. Note to Santa, you can skip my house this year, today was good enough for me and besides I really have not been all that good anyway…lol.

After shut­down a com­plete inspec­tion showed a minor oil leak at the oil fil­ter result­ing from a loose com­pres­sion fit­ting and there is an issue with the dis­trib­u­tor hold down allow­ing the tim­ing to back off as the motor is run­ning.  All minor and eas­ily fixed.  I will try to post video of the start-up when I get a minute, but it is get­ting crazy with the hol­i­days almost here.

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Well we really did not do bet­ter this week.… I’m really pressed for time and have to fin­ish the rental unit so the ten­ant can move in for the New Year.  With that, the Hol­i­days and every­thing else com­ing together at once I really don’t have the time to prop­erly work my way through the start-up problem.

We have spark, fuel and com­pres­sion but still no go.  I stopped by Spring­field Auto Machine to pick their brain as I was stumped.  The guys there are really great and after some dis­cus­sion the con­sen­sus seems to be that the engine is prob­a­bly 180 degrees out of time.  All the while I’m think­ing, how the hell can it be out of time, I fol­lowed the man­ual explic­itly.  Brought the motor to TDC and installed the dis­trib­u­tor every­thing was per­fect until Dick asked me what the valve posi­tion was, it was about this time that the “light bulb” went on in my head and I’m think­ing “Holy Crap” I installed the dis­trib­u­tor on the exhaust stroke, not the com­pres­sion stroke.….. Dick and Brian were very patient and in fact did not even roll their eyes… they even offered to come to the shop and get it started for me.  I stopped to see them on my way out of town and for the rest of the trip sit­ting in the car I was rolling this stu­pid sit­u­a­tion around in my head.  Once back in town I could not stand it any longer, cleared my sched­ule, went over to the shop and once again checked every­thing.  Sure enough, when I brought it up to TDC on the com­pres­sion stroke and checked the dis­trib­u­tor it was point­ing 180 degrees in the wrong direction.….……

I could have put the plugs back in and attempted to start, but with all of the screw­ing around and the major flood­ing of the engine in our many pre­vi­ous attempts the oil smells like gas, not to men­tion the fact that we prob­a­bly pushed a ton of fuel into the exhaust.  So we are going to change the oil and let it sit for a while to dry out before try­ing to start, prob­a­bly this weekend…

I promised my wife I’d take a break from every­thing so we are off to the Mohe­gan Sun Casino for an overnight trip to see the Boston Pops and prob­a­bly have a dozen cock­tails while I stew about how dumb I really am.  I’m not sure this trip is a great idea with the way my luck is run­ning…  I have had that dis­trib­u­tor in and out of the car at least six times and I can­not believe that in all those attempts “blind luck” would not have allowed me to get it in the right way just once!!!  Geez…That would be like flip­ping a coin six times and com­ing up heads every time, with luck like that maybe I should’nt be gam­bling at all.

We’ll be back at it and try again this weekend.

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Time con­straints have just been insane, what with putting up the tree and dec­o­rat­ing the house, along with try­ing to get the rental unit ready for the end of the month.  Oh yeah, I also have to work for a liv­ing.…. Unfor­tu­nately, the “Gray Lady” has had to play sec­ond, third and even fourth fid­dle recently, but when time allowed I have been play­ing around a little.

My major prob­lem at this point is that I am get­ting no spark, so she won’t start.  I installed a Pertronix Igniter elec­tronic sys­tem under the cap think­ing I was doing a good thing, but what looks like a sim­ple instal­la­tion has been a real PITA.  First, the dis­trib­u­tor had to go out to have the slop taken out of the shaft, then with the new parts installed we had no spark, so I messed with it for a cou­ple hours, took it back out and after talk­ing to CB Per­for­mance, they walked me through bench test­ing the unit, which checked out OK.  Re-installed it and still no spark, appar­ently a ground­ing prob­lem, took it back out and cor­rected the ground.  Re-installed again, and still no spark, so now we swapped out the new coil think­ing it might be bad.… No Dice, still no spark.  So now the dis­trib­u­tor comes out once again, this time when I bench test it, it fails, so it has to be sent back for replacement.

It seems Murphy’s Law is work­ing over­time with this one and I am tired of wait­ing, so the points and con­denser will be going back in, so we can get her started.  I am about as frus­trated as I can be at this point.  With no other projects ready I began strip­ping the trim from the rear sec­tion of the car.  The tail light bezels, chrome trim on the fins, the Cadil­lac let­ters on the fins, trunk vee and emblem are now off the car and will be sent off for plat­ing and anodiz­ing, then put away to be re-installed once she is painted (hope­fully, next Spring).

It has really been an aggra­vat­ing and stress­ful week, hope­fully the com­ing week will show bet­ter results.…Till then..

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