John S's Journal

...that I hope to start the car for the first time since 1986.

I’ve been rotating the engine over with the Marvel Mystery Oil and the oil that was in it when I bought it 10 days ago. Got a new Purolator One filter and some Valvoline VR1 20w-50w so it was time to drain and put the fresh stuff in. Next up was the distributor. With no oil filter in the way, I removed the dizzy, cleaned it up and installed new points, condenser, red rotor and cap and reinstalled. Cleaned up the NGK plugs from the wreck since they had a whopping 500 miles on them and reused those.

I pulled the valve cover and adjusted the valve lash and buttoned that back up so with the gas line plugged, I gave it a quick shot of starting fluid and decided to see what the old girl would do. If I didn’t have a leak in the rear carb and the fuel feed line was hooked up, it would have started but since I’ve got a nice clean set of HS4’s sitting on my totaled ‘70 right next to the GT I decided to swap those over for now. Getting an SU service kit is going to take awhile. Everything seems to be backordered and/or the shipping costs from the UK makes it prohibitive.
So I unbolted the AUD325’s and they will replace the AUD465’s temporarily.

The nice thing is that everything was clean and easy to remove on the wrecked car. The old leaky HS4’s weren’t that tough but the manifold gasket didn’t survive and although the one from my donor was in good shape and I didn’t have to remove the studs to get it off in one piece, I didn’t have enough wiggle room with the exhaust manifold to put the gasket on the GT. I wound up taking all of the studs out so that I could slip the gasket in after scraping all of the remnants off. I also used bolts on the outer manifold holes as that makes things easier down the road for engine removal. Got the intake and exhaust all bolted up nice and snug and ready to install the carbs. Tomorrow.