[bobs409]

A few more days go by...

All ready to do the fire up, I put in about 2-1/2 gallons of fresh gas in and THEN noticed gas dripping out of the rocker panel! !@#$! Bad omen so I cancelled the fire up for that day. (pic #1)

I cleaned this tank out real well before installing it, sloshed it around tipping the tank different direction and it never leaked. There is only one reason I can think of. After I installed it, the neck wasn't centered in the cab opening so I "tweaked" it a bit. It must have opened the seam??? Will know when I remove the tank. ARgh!!!

Having to act quickly, the only thing I could think of to catch the gas leak was to take an old radiator hose to curve around the door jam and catch the leaking gas. It worked but took about an hour or better for almost all the gas to come back out. Sure put a damper on my day…
(pic #2)

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Next day...

I decided to go ahead today with the start up. I hooked a large funnel to the fuel pump to bypass the gas tank for now. Feeding it with this “IV” avoids the fuel tank debacle for now.

Primed the oil system for a few minutes with a drill and then got it all back together.
It fired up almost immediately! It was making a loud scraping sound so shut it down. Turns out it was the flywheel cover hitting the crank flange so I got that quickly fixed.

A tapping sound got me scared again on the second run so shut down again to pull the valve covers. I found no oil getting to the rockers! (later I found it was just the exhaust manifolds needing a little tightening that caused the tapping sound)

The next day I primed the oil system again. No oil to the top end with the drill so I took all the rockers off, coated all contacting parts with lubriplate assembly lube and reinstalled and reset all the valves. I figured the only way to get oil up was to run it and with all parts coated, it would buy some time to do so. Luckily that did the trick. I could see oil running off the rockers through the oil cap opening.

I ran it 15 minutes at 2,000 RPM's and all went well. NO smoke at all! I am however not happy with the oil pressure readings. Cold and spinning with the drill I got 40lbs. Once it was warmed up, pressure at 2,000 rpms was down to 19lbs. Acceptable for a worn out engine but not good enough for a fresh rebuild. After the 15 minutes was up, I lowered the idle down and the oil pressure came down to match. At about 700 rpms, I'm only getting about 7lbs of pressure! I tried 2 gauges and both read the same. I even bled the air out of the oil pressure line but it had no improvement.

I assembled this engine myself and it's the 3rd one so far so I do have some experience. I did check all bearing clearances and all were good. I'm going to change the oil & filter and check it again. If that doesn't do the trick, I guess I'll have to drop the pan and swap that pump out.

I chose a stock pump but will go with a high volume type this time. If that doesn't work, I'm not sure what I'll try next. ??? I sure hope I don't have to pull the engine back out!!!

At this time, I’m taking a break from the engine and moving on to the doors.

On another subject, I located a source for new correct 3 panel maroon seat belt webbing so will have a friend of mine sew those up with my original buckles, clasps and retractors.