Archive for April, 2006
A Clean, A Wax and a Drive (Sort of)
Well now that the Fuel Pump is installed (even though there is a leak in the 2nd Carb) I decided to get the car out of the shop and get it cleaned up. Helen and I moved the car outside and washed the years of dust, road grime and grit off of the paint. Here’s a picture of it outside. You can see the damaged left wing on the car in this picture.
Next is the waxing and cleaning of the paint. (See photo below).
After a few hours of claying the car and applying some wax, here is the outcome. 
Not the best, but it will have to do for now.
Getting the car started!
One of the first challenges is to get the 340 started and running under it’s own power. Back in 2003 – I briefly had the car running only to discover that the rear carburetor was leaking gasoline all over the garage floor. I tried tightening the nuts that held the bowl to the carburetor but that didn’t help. Obviously the carburetors would need to be rebuilt. With a pending move from Virginia to another state the rebuild was delayed.
I enlisted the help of my local mechanic – Paul Watts of C&H Auto Service in Winter Park – to get the car started. The first we noticed was that the fuel pump wasn’t working. So Paul ordered one for me and electronic version of the classic SU pump. Here is a picture of it installed.
This picture shows the pump installed but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Paul has been trying to get me motivated to put the car back together. So when the new pump came in – he gave it to me to install. He told me it shouldn’t take me longer than 30 minutes and if I wasn’t back in an hour then he would come down to the shop and see what the problem was. Well, an hour later the pump was installed but no gas. So off I went to get Paul.
Paul and I go down to the shop and he looks over my installation and disconnects the pump and looks it over. He physically takes the pump and puts it up to his mouth and blows some air into both of the intakes. Guess what! The diaphrams in the pump are installed backwards! The pump was never going to work in it’s current state. Paul took out the diaphrams – put them in correctly and reconnected the pump.
So gas now makes it way to front of the engine – where it promptly pours out the bottom of that 2nd carb. Paul tinkered, I watched and we agreed that the carbs needed to be rebuilt. So, that’s the next task – removing the Carbs so they can be rebuilt.