Finally, after 10 months, I’ve got an engine that runs! Over the last few days we’ve done a lot of work, getting the fuel system in, cooling system completed and all sorts of wiring done up. It took a lot of playing around, but it got together in the end.
It felt so great just to put the key in the ignition, turn it, and have something happen! We got oil pressure rather quickly - after we filled up the oil filter. 🙂 Next was confirming fuel flow and so on, and it mostly worked pretty well first go, just a bit of air in the lines and so forth. We had the inlet/outlet backwards on the carby first go, since we didn’t know which one was which - the wonders of using old hardware that doesn’t have a manual 🙂
Rather than fighting with the dodgy old radiator that had been sitting there for ten months with no water in it and was full of rust, I went out and bought myself a brand new one from Slacks Creek Radiators. Originally I’d planned to get one to suit an RA40 Celica, but it seems that the one they had wasn’t anything like the pictures and information I found on the ‘net. $230 got me a brand new copper radiator which bolted straight in.
We hooked up all the coil/dizzy/leads and the rest, and in went the battery and so forth. We seemed to have the timing way off, but after working that out it all got a lot better, and now it runs! 🙂
It seems to run rather smoothly - we didn’t run it for long since the cooling system is probably really full of air - today’s work is to bleed it and keep going with the tuning process.
All I can say is, it’s SUCH a feeling of elation to have the gem running after all this time!