[Don Quixote]

Originally Posted by VWNate1

#1 :

For those who don't know, 'Rocinante' was Don Quixote's horse when he was Tilting (means attacking with a long spear) at windmills ~ learning the ins and outs of older engines and their proper tuning is often analogous to tilting at windmills .

Anyway, back on point :

I had to open my spark plugs up to .070" on one old 292 (1976 GMC C2500) before the plugs would stop getting oil fouled, after that it "flew" (the test guy's actual amazed word) through the stringent California smog test .

It also ran *perfectly* although it consumed a quart of oil every 300 miles.....

Didn't hardly leak a drop after I finished with it, no visible smoke either . I didn't use Chinese ignition parts for obvious reasons .

If you take some time you'll find dist. caps and rotors with brass contacts, these out last the aluminum ones by far .

Remember : dielectric grease in the wire ends ! . any green on a plug wire end means it's kaput ~ don't waste time trying to clean it .

Each and every plug wire should be checked with a test light, it either passes 12 volts of current or it's bad .

InLine engines often have manifold to head sealing issues, the Dealer training taught us to loosely assemble the two manifolds then offer them up to the cylinder head and start all he bolts, studs and so on, begin tightening the manifold to head bolts from the _center_ then moving outwards, one left, one right and so on ~ the idea is to even draw the manifold assy. the head .

After they're all tight go back and tighten the intake to exhaust pinch bolts .

This should help .

Get rid of those end bolts ! .

I use grade 8 only, I find it too easy to strip or break the grade 5 ones .

I also use mostly old, original hardware I collect off "junk" engines at my local junk yards ~ turned in core engines often have very good stuff on them .

Clean and de rust then re use .

I wondered if someone would figure out the correlation between my truck's name and my screen name. It's quite the story of my life and this old horse has been through most of it with me.

What I may do is put in some studs on the ends and just not put the nuts on. Definitely some good advice. Now for the ignition, I have never heard of anything with a .070 gap, that's impressive. Outside of the obvious, what are the pros and cons of a large gap? My poor truck sees all of the extremes from highway speeds for days at a time to pulling some CDL qualifying loads.