Burp.……

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.

Share on Facebook