Go With the Flow....

We replaced the rubber hose fuel lines tonight. The picture above is looking up at the gas tank, where the fuel goes out of the tank towards the engine. Also in this picture is the fuel gauge wire, which will show F----E on the dashboard. 

There was not any fuel that drained out of the tank when we disconnected the rubber hose, which means that our siphoning of the tank got the level down past this point. This means we did a good job of getting the old fuel out. We also blew out the fuel line from the fuel pump back to the fuel tank. Here's what came out.

It's a bit dirty, and stale, so it's good that we got this out. The idea here is we want good clean fresh fuel going to the engine when we try to start it up for the first time. We'll still probably change out the fuel filter after the first tank of gas. It's easy to replace, and cheap, so there is no reason not to change it. Here's a few pics of us putting in the new fuel filter:

Here's the new rubber fuel line connected to the tank, and the line up to the engine with new hose clamps.

Lastly, here's a picture of the fuel pump, where we replaced a larger section of fuel hose, connecting the pump to the fuel tank.

"Piense con Seguridad"

The other side of the gas can says "Think Safety" so along those lines we got a fire extinguisher before we siphoned off the old gas.

Ok, so it's just a precaution at this stage, we'll need it more when the body work starts and we sand and grind off the rusted out spots. The thought of open containers of gasoline, possible spills, and doing this in the garage with a car we can't just push out into the driveway if things get out of control.... Yep, we got a 5lb. Pro Grade model.

Ok, so onto the real project. Siphon out the old gas from the gas tank. We set up the first 5 gallon can and set up the siphon pump. We got two models, a $4 hand pump, and a $0.67 model we planned to use in case the hose was too short.

We thread the long hose into the bottom of the gas tank, and a few squeezes of the hand pump got the gas flowing into our stale tanks. We then waited and closely watched for 30 minutes while the bad gas drained into the gas can. A few seconds later, we started on the second 5 gallon can, which took another 30 minutes to fill. Then we started the last remaining gas can, a 2 gallon backup. A few minutes later, we're all done.

We can drop the stale gas off at the hazardous waste day at the dump, and then fill up our gas cans with some good stuff to get the engine running.

The next step will be to remove the small rubber adapter hose between the gas tank and the metal gas line up to the engine. We'll use this to get a replacement section of hose, and a bit extra so we can replace the other jumper connections.

Hey Sparky! (Part 2)

Tonight we began the exciting step of putting some things BACK TOGETHER! Since we don't want any junk getting into the cylinders, we left the loose spark plugs in their holes from last time. Tonight we replaced the old plugs with new ones, and put in new wires and a new distributor cap.

The specified gap for this engine is 0.034 so using a feeler gauge we set the gap on all the new plugs, and then for fun checked what the old gap was:

Plug 1: 0.036
Plug 2: 0.018 - We think we dropped this one.

Plug 3: 0.032
Plug 4: 0.034
Plug 5: 0.030
Plug 6: 0.034

Not bad, only one was really out of spec, and we figure something happened when we removed it. All the others were so close, that's all we could think of.

We put the new distributor cap in, and I think that there was a seal or something missing from the old one. It was much looser than the new one, and didn't seem to make an airtight/watertight seal with the distributor housing. The new wires went in easily.

Once we got all this done, we went and scrubbed down the oil pan with a wire brush to get all the old gunk out of it, and to get it ready to replace once we get the proper seal.