Sooooooo busy. Working two jobs and volunteering for organizations leaves little time for keeping up to date on activities around the garage.
The weekend after the bike had a flat, we led a Cougar Club cruise out for lunch and a visit the Wild Felid Advocacy Center of Washington. The weather was beautiful during our cruise and visit, but it rained on the way home. The yellow 69 Eliminator lost an alternator belt (discovered at lunch stop), but the battery held on long enough to visit the cats and then make it to a parts store.
I also had just enough time to install the rear wheel back on the bike with a fresh tire that weekend.
Those that ride know a new tire can be a little greasy when you first ride it. That Monday morning I left for work and the bike felt extra loose on some areas of the highway. I go into my day job really early (leave home just after 4am) which means there is much traffic. I took it easy and made it to work although I was still a little puckered when I got to my desk.
Turns out, there was black ice all over the highway (in March!?). There were so many wrecks shortly after I went through, the highway ended up getting shut down for a short while. Many people were late to work because there were so many wrecks throughout the county. I can only say someone upstairs must have been looking out for me. The route mentioned in the last post below is the exact route I take to work.
The next weekend, The Oldest brought his 73 Stingray over for an oil change. The lift really makes easy work of tasks like that, and the light kit really is genius. Pollen season was at its peak this weekend too. The video shows what accumulated in less than 48 hours.
To add to intense pollen storm, on tax day, parts of Kitsap County had a hail storms with quite a bit of accumulation. It looked like snow in some areas. I got caught in the deepest areas after work running an errand in the Corvette.
The weekend after tax day, I took the 71 over to a friend's house to look at the Holley carb and check out the ignition situation. We wanted to check the timing first, but the timing light wasn't responding properly to the car. We kept fiddling with it, and we discovered the timing light wouldn't work unless you slid the inductive pickup all the way up towards the distributor. We attributed it to a weak signal which would explain why all 8 plugs were severely fouled with black carbon.
In the middle of all that, the gear on the starter motor broke, so we had to lift the car and remove that. I discovered many extra wires that were tapping battery power off the positive post on the starter. I knew there were a lot of electrical "improvements" done to the car, and now I have place to start tracking stuff down. I'm guessing one (or more) of these extra wires is the source of my battery drain.
After hitting two parts stores, we finally had a new starter and could resume the trouble shooting. We discovered the distributor had been outfitted with Pertronix components which eliminated the points, condenser, etc. We thought the old Mallory coil might be the issue, so we borrowed the Pertronix 12v coil off my friend's Nova, but it didn't seem to make a difference.
We decided the wiring to the coil was potential source of problems, but had run out of time since I had to go to work. We left the Nova coil in the car and I drove it home. I quickly removed it when I got home and dropped it back off at his house on the way to work.
lots of bonus wiring
No matter how we tuned and wired the ignition, the car ran very rough and would ping at wide-open-throttle. More to follow later...
