Rusty Gas

After the first drive with no problems it seemed the thing to do was to keep driving the car and find any other problems there might be. Of course on the second drive I went a little further than the first, with water in the coolant system this time. I then proceeded to bog down 500 yards from the house. Thankfully it was all downhill... except the driveway.

Of course this breakdown happened 30 minutes before I needed to leave for the airport, we worked quickly and figured out no fuel was getting through the lines, so a dash of gas straight into the carburetor rolled the engine for a few ticks. During this process Scott tried to use a Styrofoam cup as a funnel... to pour gas. For those of you who don't have any kind of pyrotechnic streak: gas melts Styrofoam and creates a substance almost identical to Napalm. We couldn't get the car up the hill and so threw a tarp over it and left for the airport, with Napalm on Scott's hands: a recipe for success.

After the weekend we got the car up the hill with my brother leaning over the engine spraying starting fluid into the carb as I floored it up the hill, I wish I had a video of the shenanigans.

Once the car was back in the garage I took the whole fuel delivery system off and blew out the lines with WD-40, that didn't solve the problem, still no fuel was passing through the lines. I took both the in-line filter and in-carb filter out and cleaned them both off thoroughly. Then I put a line on either side of the fuel pump to see if that was the problem, no fuel passed through. I took the flex line between the hard line from the tank to the fuel pump off. Blew it out with WD-40 as well. Then Scott blew in the gas tank filler to pressurize the system, we got a solid clean flow through the hard line. So I'd isolated the problem to the fuel pump.

The fuel pump then bolted off and I took it apart. Thankfully it's a mechanical pump not an electrical one, so there are very few moving parts. I took the pump apart and found it had an internal filter, full of rust worse than either of the other filters. I cleaned out all the rust, WD-40'd the entire assembly scrapped off more of the silicone the previous owner puts EVERYWHERE, added my own liquid gasket, and bolted it back on.

A cleaned, rebuilt fuel pump installed I turned the engine over, gas pumped through for a moment and the engine fired into life.