Friday, September 26, 2014

Where has the time gone?

Here we are at the end of September, but I have some good news. The car is now officially road-worthy and I'm attempting to press it into daily-driver service, per the plan.

But first, there were two orders of business that had to be settled.

First was bleeding the brake system. Pretty straightforward, if not for the difficulty of getting to the bleeder screws. It's just about impossible on this car while still having a hose attached to the bleeder. With that complete, we now had a firm pedal.

The second order of business was the carb. The car would start up, run great, but then stumble and stall when warm. This was attributed to copious amounts of fuel being dumped into the intake. Clearly, a rebuild of the 2GC was in order. The original kit I ordered from RockAuto turned out to be for a marine application despite the listing. But there was a bigger problem. As Ben discovered once he got into it, the checkball for the accelerator pump was lodged firmly in its recess. No amount of compressed air, solvents, oven baking, rawhide hammering nor even hydraulic action from the port behind it would free it from its frozen cove. Luckily, Ben had enough parts on hand to cobble together something that would work. In the interim a new kit was on order from 'Chicago Corvette' (chicagocorvette.net) which was the right kit, with a great price and fast shipping.

It was Thursday night and we had a deadline to get this car going before sundown. Ben did his best carb reassembly while my friend Geoff and I worked, scrubbing the door panels, wiping down the interior, putting the rear upholstery back together and generally getting things ready. Magic Erasers to the rescue (again)!

After some difficulty getting the fuel line threaded to the carb, and locating a nut for the air cleaner (you'll recall it was missing one), the Pontiac was actually drivable. The trans appeared to work, though very low on fluid. The brakes left something to be desired- essentially a power booster without any power assist. Hmm. We loaded into the car, turned on the headlights, and made a bee-line for the nearest gas station with high octane (and made it!).

However there was one small complaint- with no exhaust system and a fairly rich mixture, fresh air was at a premium! But that's another story...