Quote:
Originally Posted by Warrens69GMC
Nice. Its always nice to keep one in the family.
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The wife's grandma is excited to see it running again. Said she'd try to find photos of the truck from way back when
The wiring fun continued into the engine compartment. HVAC, wiper, headlight, and engine harnesses were trashed. Damn things even chewed through most of the plug wires on the passenger's side; guess that partly explains the horrendous miss above 2K rpm it had once I got it running. That it even ran like that is, frankly, amazing. Depending on how bad the wiring under the dash looks, I haven't ruled out just replacing the whole harness with one from Painless...just trying to keep it cheap and functional for now.
With the gnarly engine wiring patched, lots of Simple Green, new dipstick tube, new throttle return springs, fresh plugs, wires, cap and rotor, replaced a few soft or cracked vacuum lines and figured out how to properly route them, Moroso advance curve kit, oil change with zddp, coolant flush, and a carb rebuild, it finally runs like it should after fiddling with the timing and mixture for a bit. It's a Goodwrench 350 with supposedly less than 5K miles, which I tend to believe since it's quiet, smooth, and doesn't leak a drop of anything. Still need to find a TRC dashpot to complete the emissions system so I can get it smogged, but I love the fact it's an HD emissions truck; no cat or EGR valve to deal with and very little else in the way of emissions equipment.
Seemed like the carb was emptying itself when it sat for a while since I had to manually fill it through the vent if it sat for about a week. Noticed when I tore it down that the Q-jet had the later well plugs that don't tend to leak, but it also didn't have its original check-valved filter. A repro pump-to-carb hard line and the correct carb filter and spring seemed to help initially, but after a couple of months it was definitely time for a new pump; just enough fuel was running back down through the pump when it sat that the accelerator pump couldn't give me those shots at startup. Fires right up after a couple of pumps now.