iamstuffed.com

Today I stopped by the seller’s house to have him look over the vacuum system, since I found a plugged line while trying to diagnose the power loss. On my drive over, I noticed that the kickdown switch was under the pedal, and needed to be pressed past the point when you think you have the pedal floored. Once I did that, it downshifted fine and had plenty of power.

While at his house, he replaced two vacuum valves and one black vacuum thingy, and fixed some of the vacuum hose connections. It turned out that one of the vacuum lines had a BB in it (from a BB gun?), and some cables weren’t even connected to anything.  He mentioned something about Crazy Rays and getting parts there for later, so he can replace the remaining black vacuum thingy.  He definitely knows his stuff!  Crazy Ray’s looks like an awesome place to get parts for an old car.

He took the leaking injector out and took it apart.  One of the metal mating surfaces had a burr or gouge in it, so he filed it down and sanded it and put it back together.  After test driving some more, it ended up leaking again, so he found another spare injector and just used the top portion of the spare with the bottom casing of the leaking one.  After installing it a second time, the leak was fixed!  He showed the injector to me and explained that the nozzles looked like they were new so I can probably hold off on buying new injectors.

The turbo seems like it’s working now and the fuel leak has been fixed, so tomorrow Andrea will be driving it to work!

For the little that I’ve test driven this car (Andrea test drove it), I’ve noticed that the car has no power, either from the transmission not down shifting properly, or the turbo providing no boost.  There could be several reasons for this, but I suspect the top reason is vacuum related.  Below are two images of something I discovered after inspecting obvious vacuum fittings.  The junction near the screw on fuel filter has a line that is plugged with a wooden dowel!  That means anything downstream from that tube isn’t getting any vacuum.  So far the only symptom has been the lack of power and the shifting issue.  I spoke with the seller and he’s going to help diagnose the problem on Monday.