4/5/2025

I’m a realistic fella. I had one actual goal today: replace the nuts, bolts, and donuts for the exhaust system.

Emma had different ideas.

First and foremost, I want you to look at this photo and tell me what it looks like to you:

Doesn’t the end of that bolt look like someone already took a punch and tried to hammer that bolt out of there? Yeah. Good times.

So I went to the passenger side (the easier side from an access perspective) and removed the nuts holding it together.

Even after removing the nuts, there was NO WAY I was moving the exhaust system going back to the mufflers enough to get the donut out. Just not enough give.

Additionally, it looks like at some point, someone welded the bolts into the cast iron manifold end, presumably so the nuts would stop slipping. Those mfers are not coming out. Ever. Our only option now is to replace the manifolds with repros.

Or do headers. That’s a later-Brian problem.

So I put things back together (best I could) and moved on.

I did manage to accomplish one major thing today! I loosened both bolts on the alternator and managed to wedge a long wrench in there enough to tighten the V-Belt! Finally! No more squealing at every engine start!

I got distracted after that and moved on to the timing. I know.

“Hey Brian, hows about you go after the most complicated thing wrong with your car?

Here we are. I did a lot of work on that today. Managed to hook up a vacuum tester to the carburetor:

The whole point of this is to get the engine into the green – to do that (in this case), I needed to loosen the holding nut on the distributor and turn it either clockwise or anti-clockwise until we were in the green:

This is overly simplified, if I’m being honest. There was marking of the harmonic balancer at 10 degrees (again) and then using a timing light to find the right tuning – but in the end that tuning – and it runs and sounds great – ended up putting us at like 45 goddamn degrees over (presumed) top-dead center (TDC):

All good at a normal 850 RPM idle, but a possibility that when we get to really pushing the car (speed or hills) that it’ll shit itself and destroy the engine.

Seriously though, the car runs better at an idle than it has since I bought it.

So what are next steps?

Well, we’re going back in time like 3-6 months!

I have an 18mm (the size of my spark plugs) piston stop tool on the way from the Tree company.

Using that I’ll be able to determine ACTUAL TDC. With actual TDC I’ll be able to conclusively determine whether:

1. The harmonic balancer on my engine has shifted significantly and I’m not ACTUALLY 45 degrees off 0 (my hope)
2. I have a super aggressive cam installed in the engine that is not really all that compatible with the engine
3. I have a horrible vacuum leak
4. I have a sticking lifter (probably the worst case scenario)
5. The carb is horribly misconfigured or not responding to configuration
6. The distributor is borked (bad, but not catastrophic)
7. The distributor was purposely “locked” by a former owner (would be annoying, but we can work around it)

TLDR: I need to find TDC again. Like, for realies this time. That’s the first step to everything.

But man, does it run really, really well right now at an 850 RPM idle. Like. Butter.

Here are some more pictures of the adventures today: