Today, I set aside the whole afternoon to seriously troubleshoot the wagon's carb. I've suspected for a while that the culprit was the fuel cutoff solenoid on the back of the carb. But for one reason or another, I haven't had the chance to figure out exactly why this "new" junkyard carb wouldn't work. Everything looked in great shape, but for some reason, no fuel was getting into the engine. The wagon has an aftermarket fuel pump, there's fuel pressure up to the carb, but no fuel getting into the engine.
First things first... yesterday I had the battery recharged since I drained it most of the way by forgetting to disconnect it while it sat for 3 months. So I installed the freshly-charged battery and just for kicks, tried to start it one more time. The familiar sequence of events happened: I put the key in, heard the fuel pump come on, cranked it a bunch, but no starty goodness.
Except one thing was different! As I got out of the car, I noticed a really strong gasoline smell... Oh snap! I forgot to tighten the fuel lines when I reattched the carb yesterday. The pump basically pumped fuel all over the intake side of the engine. So I had to spend a few minutes cleaning all that up. Don't want to pull a Victor and set my engine bay on fire due to a fuel leak. hehee...
Well, I knew that it wasn't going to start as-is, but at least I knew the battery was good now. So, on to the fuel cutoff solenoid. I restripped the mystery wire coming out of the back of the solenoid, spliced it in with a nice thick long piece of wire. With the key in the "on" position, I touched it to the negative post on the battery. There was an audible click-click every time I touched the wire to the post and took it off. So that meant that the solenoid was in fact working. I then wedged the wire into the negative battery clamp and tried starting her up.
It took a good 7-8 seconds of cranking before I could hear that the engine was starting to turn over on its own. A few more seconds of keeping the pedal mashed and holding the starter down and it finally roared to life! Well, more like sputtered to life, but it was working! I had to keep the pedal floored for a minute or two until it warmed up enough to keep itself running. I went back to the engine bay and turned the idle screw just a touch to bring the engine speed up enough that it didn't want to die.
I couldn't tell what the RPMs were at idle. Unfortunately, in all the wiring mayhem, I completely disconnected the aftermarket tachometer. It never worked in the first place, but at least it used to light up. I'll try to get a wiring diagram for it so I can hook it back up.
After getting it nice and warmed up and making sure that everything was working correctly, I turned it off and wired up the solenoid the right way. I butt spliced the new wire into the solenoid's short lead, grounded it to the same ground that the fuel pump was using, and tucked all the wiring into the carb's wiring loom.
Sure enough, it fired right back up, so I put Drew's car seat in it and we went for a drive around the block.
I'm so excited!!
