Throttle linkage broke again today. I was getting ready for a cruise in and it wasn't having it. Spent a couple hours and 3 trips to the hardware store to try to come up with something stronger but no dice. We pulled the tarp off the AA and drove it up there just 'cuz so didn't miss out but it was a bummer not getting to bring the hot rod. This is what I had before, I booger welded it (don't judge, I loaned my machine and got it back with no tip) last time it broke but it just broke in front of the weld. This linkage ****ed, it worked but it had too many pivot points and the little arm that hangs down, when you hit the gas, wanted to flip sideways before it started opening the throttle and eventually that bends the allthread and it breaks from fatigue. Obviously I need some kind of pivot attached to the manifold but I have no idea how to start designing this. Any clues would help... I thought about just tying the two together and using a cable to open one but I don't like cables.
You need to have it setup to pull, not push, to open one carb and a rod connecting the 2 carbs that will then pull the other carb open at the same time with spring return
That intake is ugly AF....pull that thing off of there next time you come over and we will make it look good. I dont have anything useful for the throttle linkage dilemma, but Mr. Stevens makes a good point. Pulling is way less stressful than pushing. Hard to achieve without breaking your rule about having everything old school, kinda like that bad*** quick connect/release steering wheel from the turn of the century, just not sure which century it is from!
Heated & bent the throttle arm to invert it (so it would push rather than pull). Bent up the linkage that used to run from the hand throttle to the throttle control and connected it to a plate I made & attached to the linkage on the rear carburetor. I need to fine tune the linkage between the carbs and find a more elegant solution for the springs, that's just what I had sitting around, but it works wonderfully and looks slicker than what I had.
I'm liking it... Debating on pulling the bed again to fix the sagging, since I'm working on the turtle deck and might have it ready to go on soon. Decisions decisions...
Also got the flywheel back. 42 lbs, down from 63, and balanced. Not bad but I should have bought a Burtz flywheel for what it cost. Oh well. The Burtz would have had some "hidden fees" with other stuff I'd have had to buy for it.
I coulda ground 21lbs off that flywheel with as many flap disks of mine that you've burned through since I've been helping you work on stuff!! They are cheap on Amazon! It'll be interesting how much more giddy-up it's gonna have!
Got caught in the dark the other day which ****ed, so I figured I'd quit kicking the can down the road and make the lights work. Finally converted the tail lights to dual filament sockets and Saul got everything wired up for me.
Just some hijinks today. Checked out the Model A club's upcoming tour route with Saul and cruised it around well into the dark to make sure the headlights are gonna be worth a ****. They work pretty good!
How come THIS GUY is out riding and having FUN and im stuck in the shop full of JUNKERS!!!! LOL... Enjoy watching the FUN your having trevor..Continue on...
I'm told the Dallas club is kind of that way, but the Fort Worth club is a great group and has been more than welcoming. I've been a member for a couple of years and I am really excited to finally be able to get my car out to play with them.
She started running rough on me. The distributor hold down bolt was tapped directly into the aluminum. I had been going very easy on that bolt because the threads already felt kinda bad & I didn't want to strip it but I did notice it had gotten loose so I tightened it up and the engine resumed running fine only to start running rough again a little while later; threads are jacked, can't tighten the bolt, need to helicoil it. That's as good a reason as any to swap the B distributor in, which requires me to change the timing cover. A while back my friend George found this B cover in his stash and told me to come get it; it was pretty rusty. Here it is ready to install. Putting the B distributor in required me to remove the valve cover to get the Nu Rex timing gizmo out. I have been thinking about putting adjustable lifters in here for a while but I didn't really want to dig into this engine deep enough to do it. Well, somehow up til now I never noticed that it already has adjustable lifters, or if I did ever notice I have since forgotten. This was also a good time to replace the broken generator pulley. When I removed the old timing cover, the corresponding section of the oil pan gasket came with it, so I went to various parts stores in search of cork to patch that area with and by the time I found some, it was too dark to continue. Hopefully we will be in business tomorrow.
In theory only the ignition timing. Base timing with the B dizzy is 19 degrees BTDC. Many Model As are running B distributors with that timing setting and get down the road just fine, yet mine, which would not come above 140 degrees after 25 minutes on the highway, was boiling hot after a five minute run around the block... My best guess is something is wrong with the distributor, like perhaps the advance weights are not retracting and it is sitting too far advanced at idle. Last time I tried to use this distributor I knew almost nothing about cars and had a feeling that something was wrong but I didn't know where to start diagnosing it, so I switched back to the A distributor. Now I know a little more and am not afraid to dig into this distributor.
I run a B distributor on a B engine with an A timing cover. I just set the timing where it works. And, it works fine. The engine had a Model A dist, carb, manifolds etc when I got it. I put a 6.0 head and B dist etc on it for better performance. Dave
The car has been sitting for a little while (I bought a corvette instead of fixing it) but I'm planning to get back after it soon. Buying parts always gets the blood pumping, so I bought (or will shortly be buying) parts. Picking up an S10 T5 on Friday. This will entail converting to open drive, but I came prepared. I have two open drive banjos already set up to go in Model As and I believe I have another AA bellhousing... somewhere... I have to go out and figure out what ratios those rears are but if either of them are 3.54 the car should LOVE it - looks like it should cruise 80 at 2500 rpm! And at the Model A's redline of ~3600 rpm it has a theoretical top speed of 115 mph which is funny to think about but it probably doesn't make the torque to hit that. Of course I'll have to address the head gasket and mysterious overheat too. More on that later.
My thought today with the overheat is that it probably didn't overheat so much as finally came up to temperature and the head gasket failed completely when it finally built some actual pressure. It was already a bit shady - that was a copper head gasket that I reused and it would occasionally seep coolant into the #4 cylinder. I should get one of the Best gaskets for high compression. I'm still a bit confused about the timing requirements of the B distributor... but I'll figure that out.
The Jalopy Journal
