jcatnite
Jedi Knight
Offline
Well, the “1500 Rebuild” post has gone off in such a direction that I felt I might need to start a new one. Let me start by saying that I know how difficult it is to try and troubleshoot something that someone is describing to a bulletin board…lol. Anyway, my 1500 that is in the 76 Midget is still idling pretty rough. I have a lot of information about it just having trouble putting it all together and hoped that someone here might see something that I am missing. First off the car has almost 80k on it so compression is 135 psi on 1-3 and 125 psi on #4. The PO removed the OPUS distributor and put a 25D from what I think is a 74ish 1275. The coil is new. Cap, rotor, condenser, points, and wires probably have around 250 miles on them. The dizzy seems pretty tight in that there isn’t much play in it and when I rev the engine the timing mark is stable. There is some evidence of arcing on the points and in the cap but not too serious. Plugs have about 50 miles on them and they are nice and brown. Carb seems to load up a bit towards the rich side when the car idles for an extended period (probably not related but fuel and ignition play off of each other so much I thought I would include it). OK now for the weird stuff. The car’s vacuum is only around 15 to 16 inches. To get that much I have to run the timing around 18 degrees before. Anything less than that and vacuum drops to an unmanageable 13”. I have the idle speed set at around 900rpm can get it to idle at 800 but it is a bit smoother at 900. I have sprayed carb cleaner in all the usual places looking for vacuum leaks and don’t really seem to have any. While the engine is running, if I pull the plug wires (from the cap…lol) from #1 or #2 cylinder, the rpm’s drop by 150 to 200 but when I pull 3 or 4 wires I only loose 75 to 100 rpm with 3 taking more away than 4. I’ve swapped wires around to see if it could be in the wires with no discernable change. So I guess my question is how smooth should I be able to get this engine to idle? It shakes the car so much right now that you couldn’t use the mirrors if you wanted to. Also any ideas why the timing would need to be so high? I know the valves probably need adjusting as I can hear them just a little. I’m waiting on a gasket set from VB before I tackle that one. Guess I better stop as this one is getting a little long and will probably loose everyone’s attention if I put anymore in…lol Oh, one thing I forgot to add...the dwell has slipped a bit from 58 to around 50 but that is still too close to make me want to mess with adjusting the points right now.
Thanks in advance,
JC
Thanks in advance,
JC