October
IT STARTED SHE RUNS!!!!!!!
Well the body has been final fitted and all now riveted so attention was turned to the engine to get it to start.
One problem that we encountered was that I have a Mallory distributor which has a different wiring set up to the MSD distributor that normally is supplied with the crate engines from American Speed. So a quick Google and a wiring diagram was printed out and a temporary wiring was rigged up until I can get the correct wiring harness from the States. Yes I know this should have been notice before I got to this point, but it didn't delay the start up.
I bought an oil pump priming tool to get the oil flowing through the engine and up to operating pressure before actually starting the engine, this is achieved by removing the distributor and placing one end of the tool down the distributor shaft into the oil pump and the other end is then connected to the drill (just make sure the batteries are charged) and start whirrring until you see the oil pressure gauge start to climb I managed to get good oil pressure after about 10 minutes. This done replace the distributor, remembering the orientation when it was removed! tighten everything up and connect the main battery wires, do a last minute check on fuel/oil lines.......................and then switch on and press the flashing gearknob button...........................
After a few attempts it was obvious that it wasn't going to fire!!!
Back to the Chevy book to look at timing, maybe I got it all wrong. We then went through the procedure for timing the engine, ever tried turning over a high compression engine with a spanner on the crank pulley, we got the timing marks to zero and what we thought was TDC, took the dizzy cap off and the rotor arm was pointing to the back of the engine, it should be pointing to #1 piston. So it looked like I had the timing 1800 out! Took the dizzy out and turned it the 1800 and retighten everything up.
Right do the checks again................................press the button.......................and........................
a huge backfire through the carb scared the like out of me, not to mention the fire that was going on in the carb (we had removed the airfilter, thankfully) but hey, atleast we know we had something going on! So it was a case of turning the engine over whilst turning the dizzy to get the timing somewhere in the region so that it would fire. After a few more spectacular backfires through the carb the battery decided to call it a day, and no I didn't have any booster leads. This is how it went for the next couple of hours, but finally after a bit of fiddling it suddenly caught and while not exactly bursting into life it was running, a little tweak of the dizzy and it was running smoother a few healthy blips and it was shaking the house doors!!! By this time it was around 6.30-7.00 so it was decided to switch off as the cam wasn't yet bedded in.
To bed in a cam which has a high lift to it, you must run the engine for at least 20 minutes at over 2000 revs, let cool, then repeat. You need to bed the rings in first so fire it up and give it some hard blips on the throttle. Then if it's a pushrod engine you need to hold at 3000 rpm's for some 20 minutes so as not to overload the cam lobes.
I'll be doing this at the weekend Saturday seems a good day as most people will be out and about and the noise shouldn't be too much of an issue!!!!!
Until then.