The beast is awakening!

After two successive weekends tinkering in the [poop coloured] Volvo with my neighbor (well, truthfully, he did most of the tinkering - I was the tool gopher!), it is finally starting to sound a little better. Last Sunday we replaced the aquarium tube with a real fuel line (I am dead serious!! Gasoline eats through normal plastic. Eventually, had this happened, a fuel leak on a hot engine would have caused my car to spontaneously combust!). Greg checked and cleaned the spark plugs, as well as the rotor and distributor cap, to make sure that the engine does misfire. (See how much I am learning? Greg promises to turn me into a mechanic yet!)

Then we (well, he) tried to adjust the timing so that it would idle properly... that took most of the afternoon, cuz the stupid car doesn't want to do what the manual says it should! First of all we coudn't see the notch in the pulley to get the strobe light set. When we found what looked/felt like a notch, we saw that while the car should, according to the manual, idle at 10 or so, but we had to set it at 8, by ear (we didn't entirely trust the notch!), because it was idling way to high on the tachometer (instument that measures your rpm). When we realised that changing the rear break light could have been done in 10 minutes instead of 40 had we done it in daylight, we called it quits.

That was last weekend.

Today we changed the spark plugs, rotor, and distributor cap, replaced the burned out headlights (two of them - and I did it all by myself, having had practice on the Audi, and in the dark at that!), checked the wires going from the distributor to the spark plugs to make sure their resistance is what it should be, got a new coil (like transformer to increase oomph from a standard 12V battery), retimed the engine once we found the real notch in the pulley, added ATF (Automatic Transmission Fluid) into the power steering (who knows why, but that's what they ask for!) as well as in the carburator (one so old it needs oil!).

The car sounds quieter, runs smoother, starts nicer (new distributor cap means no chance of moisture in electrical lines leading to spark plugs). It still likes to kachunk-kachunk when the engine is cold, but not as long, and not as hard... probably a carburator problem, but it costs too much to get it rebuilt, even buying a kit.

Having eliminated the potential explosions (I hope), and all electrical reasons for slowness, for sluggishness, for sheer cussed gutlessness, we figure the next thing to replace is the fuel pump, since the fuel filter should be filled with fuel, and isn't. That means that the carburator is being starved, and hence the engine has little power, especially at low rpm. So when I get a new fuel pump, we can readjust the fuel mixture and see if that solves the kachunk-kachunking, or whether it is a carb problem too.

Did I loose you? I think I lost myself! But this way, perhaps I won't forget what I learned?