D-26: It Lives!
It was a nerve-wracking day yesterday, but as the headline reads, the rebuilt motor is alive! After rotating the crankshaft by hand to get the no. 1 cylinder to TDC (or close), I installed the distributor (with new cap and rotor) and wired up all the spark plugs and the coil. Rolled the car out into the driveway because if you burn down the car, you can always rebuild it, unless you burn down the garage, too. Sage advice, Stevo.
On the first try, I flipped the ignition switch and the red light didn’t even light up. WTF! Turns out that I forgot to re-plug in the main power harness to the switch when I was finished working on the switchgear. Problem easily fixed.
Second try, flipped the ignition switch and the red light comes on. Success! Short lived, though. Press the starter button and nothing. Bupkis. Double WTF! Rolled the car back into the garage. Clearly something is not right with my wiring work, right?
Ha! Wrong! Turns out that one of the two main connections between the body harness and the engine had gotten knocked loose sometime during my work on the engine. That connection contains the lead that goes from the starter relay to the starter that tells the starter to go-go-go.
So, plugged that in, rolled the car back outside, sat down, flipped all the flippy switches, pressed the starter button and - whir, whir, whir. Turning over but no start.
In my head, I knew that this is normal. After all, there’s been no fuel in this fuel rail since at least November. But in my heart, I was freaking out a little bit. What if all this work is done and I can’t get the engine to start? Epic fail.
Second try, whir, whir, whir — vroom! Yippee! Even though I hadn’t set the timing on the distributor to anything than basically dead center of its range, it started and purred like a kitten. Oil pressure came right up (yea!) and hung steady at about 75 psi, which isn’t surprising given the thick break-in oil that’s in the car right now. I let the car run at somewhere just above idle for a few minutes, then noticed some wispy smoke from around the exhaust manifold. It’s probably just the new seals on everything getting hot for the first time, but I shut it down anyway. I’ll roll under the car tonight to see if we’re melting anything important
Yesterday was a big hooray day. Looks like we’ll have a car with a running engine for the race!
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