Yesterday’s time working on the car was, unfortunately, back in an all-too-familiar old pattern of getting very little useful done given the time spent. I had hoped to get the exhaust hangers installed, and get the under-dash panel installed. I ran into issues with both, and in over two hours in the garage, ended up with basically nothing to show for it.
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First Start Video
I finally got a chance to edit together some clips of the three days I spent trying to get the engine started. Its still disappointing the video doesn’t end with a nicely purring (or roaring) engine, but it started, and thats a start.
A word of warning, I suppose: My friend who was taping has a mouth like a sailor, so… if you have kids and still live in the fantasy that they’ve never heard any of Carlin’s seven dirty words you can’t say on television… well, don’t let them watch the video.
Cleaning Up the Dash Wiring
Fresh off getting the engine started… sort of… its back to the work week and back to finding things I can do in a couple hours in the evening. I e-mailed back and forth with Retrotek today about the tuning, but the weather is lousy for the next couple of days, so I can’t really take another stab at the engine until perhaps Thursday.
I decided today to do some cleaning up of the wiring behind the dash. Now that I know the engine works, the wiring behind the dash is basically done and I can get it cleaned up and get the sheet metal installed, as well as get the dash mounted and the associated bits wrapped up.
Starting the Motor
This weekend was a nerve-wracking time. As I’d suggested earlier last week, my intent was to get the engine done wiring up and get it started this weekend. While I assumed it wouldn’t necessarily start and run well on the first try, I did hope it would’ve been an easier process than it turned out to be.
Wiring Up the Starter
It was a gorgeous day today in Southern New Hampshire — sunny and 70 degrees. It was an awful day to be sitting in the office, but it was definitely a day to work on the car when I got home.
I wanted to get the starter wired up, and maybe the coolant filled, in order to start the engine tomorrow. As it turned out, I tried to start it tonight, but failed.
Installing the Side Pipes
After two weeks of waiting, the side pipes finally showed up today. While, strictly speaking, I didn’t need them to start the car, it was definitely something I wanted to have on the car before starting the motor. Without the side pipe, I wouldn’t have the oxygen sensor on the car.
I don’t have the rubber hangers I need to install all the mounting brackets, but I wanted to get them bolted up to the car.
Painting Some Parts
I didn’t want to lose any momentum I’d built up last week, so although today was a bit of a hectic day being back at work after a week off, I still wanted to get a bit of work done on the car when I got home. It was a nice sunny evening, so it wasn’t hard to motivate myself to open the garage door and work on the car in the sun.
Build Week Wrapup
I’m a little late posting an update — Friday and Saturday ended up being hectic days outside of working on the car, and it usually takes me a half hour or an hour to sit down and write one of these updates and go through the photos. I did want to get an update posted today about how the build week ended up. (I should also mention, speaking of going through the photos, that all the photos I take do get posted to this site but only a small portion of them end up featured in a post — the gallery link on the right side of the page will bring you into the full gallery.)
I got two more days of work done on the car, although both Friday and Saturday ended up a good bit less productive than the rest of the week. I’d been eight days on the car, so that doesn’t really bother me. I spent a bunch of time going to local stores for some parts I needed to get things wrapped up. The devil is in the details, and it turns out there was as lot of details I had to work though.
Build Week – Thursday
The build week continued today with my fourth day off work working on the car, and really the sixth consecutive day working on it. The last post about the IRS configuration covered the first couple hours of the day. I was absolutely exhausted and sore when I finished that work. As a result, I decided to focus essentially entirely on wiring for the rest of the day. That’d been basically my plan for most of the week anyway, but frankly I didn’t have the energy to do anything more physical than that.
Making My Wheels Fit… or… How to Setup IRS Correctly
I mentioned in last night’s update that I had spent a few hours yesterday evening working on fixing my IRS setup so my wheels and tires would fit correctly. This morning I finished up the process, at least well enough for now, and wanted to post an update about it.
Its annoying that the Factory Five manual explains this poorly at best, just plain incorrectly at worst. Thats apparently well known, but was news to me. Unfortunately had I known, it would’ve been much easier to tweak and adjust before I had assembled the trunk. On the upside, I do know that even with the trunk assembled, I can still get to everything back there.
Continue reading Making My Wheels Fit… or… How to Setup IRS Correctly