I'm feeling more frustration than pain, I'm working on the car almost every day but time just flies past. It all looks straightforward, I've been gathering parts for many years so there's nothing I have to drop everything to go in search of, yet progress is still slow. Engine is now running well, but took a while to get there. I've run it fairly regularly to move in and out of workshop, and it has always been spluttering, farting and popping. Modern petrol had been dissolving all the muck from the fuel system and clogging the carbs so I cleaned everything up, found TDC and made timing marks, new points condenser rotor cap leads, clean slate time. Fired her up and it was barely any better, running on 4 1/2 cyls at best, pulled the coil lead slightly out from the cap, make the coil work harder and up the spark, this helped, so I threw in a set of new plugs although the originals were barely used I don't trust the little buggers, now running on 6 but way too rich at idle, spitting viciously at me, I played around with float levels for only a very slight improvement, bloody thing had me stumped, whipped the carbs apart and found all 3 idle jets have been overtightened and distorted the seatings, the jets have hex as well as slotted heads inviting a good tightening with a spanner rather than nipping with a screwdriver, this abuse most likely occured 50-ish years ago. Easy enough to fix though, popping a small O ring on each jet made a perfect seal, actually an improvement on original.
Now it goes and stops, just lights, wipers and horn and it's back on the road.
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