Mechanical Mayhem!

You should get rid of that beater and get a Saturn or something.

No?


How about a Kia?


Just kidding, I sometimes actually enjoy weekends like that!

Ha, ha! I don't think half the folks here have heard of a Trabant!

When I was in high school my friend's girlfriend was driving him home one night in his '67 cougar when she wiped it out sideways on a median. The year he was restoring it he had to drive a Vauxhall Viva!

for the last couple of weeks my best friend and i have been working on his 84 dodge pick up. last weekend we pulled the dead 360 out of the truck and the 318 that was in his 73 charger. we re-sealed the 318, changed the timing cover, timing chain, oil pump, distributor and intake manifold. the 318 went in the truck but we had some problems.

it was me, him and his 16 year old son doing all this, well in the process of installing the 318, we all managed to screw something up. his son managed to snap off a header bolt, luckily it was just overstretched and didn't bottom out in the head so we were able to extract it with a pair of needle nose. i managed to somehow pull the threads out of the intake when i was installing the carb, i had purposely decided to install the carb so my friends son didn't overtighten the carb bolts and do exactly what i did. in my defense though, we think he had already managed to screw up the threads when he put the carb plate on to install the engine, he used oversized nuts on the studs as a spacer and we're pretty sure he overtightened them and started the thread pulling problem. i barely had any torque on the nut at all, probably 3-4 ft lbs. my friend forgot a timing cover bolt and when we started the truck up it was instant coolant leak, luckily for us those were all easy fixes.

now we are having other problems either with the timing or the carb or both. when we first fired it up and set the carb and the timing it ran like a top, now it misses at idle, but runs smooth on the top end. the engine is only pulling about 10 inches of vacuum at best and we aren't real sure why, it does have a slight cam but it's nowhere near that radical to be only be pulling 10 inches of vacuum. we suspect the vacuum problem may be carb related somehow, but not real sure. also we used the old distributor out of the 360 since it's an electronic ignition, where as the old dizzy from the 318 was points. i'm starting to suspect the distributor has worn bushings and is causing the erratic idle. anyway we still have probably another entire weekend of tuning to get it running right.