So today was a good day! Kelly came over and he had some of the needed single barrel bullet connector sleeves and we made progress connecting up the wiring harness. I took care of the rear connections while Kelly managed the engine bay. It went pretty went and we were able to do some testing of the connections for the lights etc. It seems as though some of the side markers seem to use a blue rather than red wire but as long as you know this it’s manageable! Kelly made good use of the horn wiring to do some continuity tests and it seems likely there’s a loose bulb connection in the front right side marker – not too serious.
We didn’t get too far with the main harness itself but we felt safer trying to fire the engine. We had to make some adjustments to the carbs. I had managed to get the choke linkage out of line so that meant taking the carbs off again (I’m getting pretty quick at this now). Once that was sorted we worked on getting the accelerator and choke cables connected – marionette strings just weren’t going to work.
Kelly was able to get both hooked up and working but although we could get the engine to fire it wouldn’t run for more than a few seconds and by this time we had pretty much drained the battery. So we got hold of a battery charger and then tested the fuel pump which was still working fine so the fuel pump was not, in fact, the issue.
We turned our attention back to the carbs and removed them yet again and started to check the floats and the jets. The rear carb was first and not that much fuel came out. Kelly checked the float and the jet and we wondered if the jet had been stuck closed. Once checked we spayed in some carb cleaner and that came flying out the other end of the front carb so it seems that solved anything that might have been an issue. Then we opened the front carb and loads of fuel came out – more like Kelly expected. We concluded that probably meant the front carb was fine and then reinstated the carbs back on the car.
I had looped the carb overflows without a vent and Kelly thought that might be preventing the fuel from getting through and so we took that hose off and didn’t bother connecting the crank case vent either. After messing with the choke a bit we eventually got the car to fire and run! The SU’s were alive – yeah!
The car would now fire fairly well and we could start it as needed. I may have a poor seal on the rear engine cover as there seems to be a little oil leaking and also we think we were getting a little smoke coming from the crank case vent. Not sure about that – we’ll save that for Monday night.
We then got the car backed out somewhat and were able to use its own power to do this and then load the car on the trailer. This all went pretty well and just after 3PM we had her loaded and “ready to roll”. I have since just given the car a quick wash as the dust build up was getting rather dusty. Hopefully the towing will be uneventful and we can make some more progress at John’s shop tomorrow.
See video:
Original Fire Up Video with the Weber available in this post.
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