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·Well I had only planned on hoo
Well I had only planned on hooking up the various systems over the next few days...but the closer I got to getting the heart of the beast all hooked up, the temptation became too strong. I poored some distilled water in her, some oil, checked all connections, hopped in and turned the key.....vroooooom! But this only lasted a second or so. Over the next hour I checked things over, restarted....same result...it would fire up and then die. Now I'm getting worried....but keep nosing around. It is a MUST if you've done a major service like I have to have a fire extinguisher on hand just in case the unmentionable happens. Finally I figured it could be out of gas as it had very little when I parked it 4 months ago. The fuel gage shows just a smidge...but how far can you trust those Italian electronics? So I carefully add a couple of gallons. One more look at the motor...I smell gas but see no leaks. Then YIKES !! The banjo fittings on the fuel distributors lines were "wet". I grab some wrenches and climb into the back of the engine bay and tighten down things a bit more...carefully. Then I hop in and turn the key...vrooom....and it dies. One last try....vrooooooom.....and it settles down to a 1300rpm idle and runs very smooth! Hooooray! By the way, I do not have the exhaust on the car yet, so it's running open loop, but still sounds very good. It seems to run much better than before I serviced it. It revs up very quickly, and then nice blue flames would shoot out of the headers during deceleration. All in all I'm very happy! Still lots of tuning and tweaking to do. But at least I didn't screw anything up doing all that work.
Oh....almost forgot, my car used to be kinda sluggish after warm up, not really as quick as it should have been. When tearing it apart I remember the throttle cable not running through the little hole under the fuel distributors but off to the side, and the return spring was barely doing it's job. Well upon installing the throttle cable it was not long enough to engage the linkage....hmmmm. I now believe it was part of the problem of lack of power. I re-adjusted the throttle linkage and made sure the pedal to the metal resulted in both throttles being wide open. What a difference! I can't wait to see how she runs now! I am a whipped puppy right now as I'm not a teenager and doing all this work on your back, and climbing around in the engine bay, no power tools, takes a lot out of a person. But I have new energy now that Darth Vader is so close to being road ready. I just wanted to share this with everyone. I hope you all don't get sick of my posting so much.
Well I had only planned on hooking up the various systems over the next few days...but the closer I got to getting the heart of the beast all hooked up, the temptation became too strong. I poored some distilled water in her, some oil, checked all connections, hopped in and turned the key.....vroooooom! But this only lasted a second or so. Over the next hour I checked things over, restarted....same result...it would fire up and then die. Now I'm getting worried....but keep nosing around. It is a MUST if you've done a major service like I have to have a fire extinguisher on hand just in case the unmentionable happens. Finally I figured it could be out of gas as it had very little when I parked it 4 months ago. The fuel gage shows just a smidge...but how far can you trust those Italian electronics? So I carefully add a couple of gallons. One more look at the motor...I smell gas but see no leaks. Then YIKES !! The banjo fittings on the fuel distributors lines were "wet". I grab some wrenches and climb into the back of the engine bay and tighten down things a bit more...carefully. Then I hop in and turn the key...vrooom....and it dies. One last try....vrooooooom.....and it settles down to a 1300rpm idle and runs very smooth! Hooooray! By the way, I do not have the exhaust on the car yet, so it's running open loop, but still sounds very good. It seems to run much better than before I serviced it. It revs up very quickly, and then nice blue flames would shoot out of the headers during deceleration. All in all I'm very happy! Still lots of tuning and tweaking to do. But at least I didn't screw anything up doing all that work.
Oh....almost forgot, my car used to be kinda sluggish after warm up, not really as quick as it should have been. When tearing it apart I remember the throttle cable not running through the little hole under the fuel distributors but off to the side, and the return spring was barely doing it's job. Well upon installing the throttle cable it was not long enough to engage the linkage....hmmmm. I now believe it was part of the problem of lack of power. I re-adjusted the throttle linkage and made sure the pedal to the metal resulted in both throttles being wide open. What a difference! I can't wait to see how she runs now! I am a whipped puppy right now as I'm not a teenager and doing all this work on your back, and climbing around in the engine bay, no power tools, takes a lot out of a person. But I have new energy now that Darth Vader is so close to being road ready. I just wanted to share this with everyone. I hope you all don't get sick of my posting so much.
