Vroom, Vroom

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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