Archive for the ‘Fuel System’ Category
The Carbs are back!
After a few weeks, our carbs and the linkage they went away with came back from Tampa. I had no idea how dirty the carbs were when they went, because the carbs that returned looked new! See Photo below.
When I started to install them on the manifold, I realized that the Carburetor Manifold Blocks were bad and they needed to be replaced. So, I ordered two and waited for them to arrive before the carb s could be reinstalled. lesson learned – double check all components (I replaced the gaskets ) but forgot the manifold blocks.
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.