Tag: tune up

2020 Spring maintenance

Posted on by nvonada

Most years I do annual maintenance every spring in March or April when we get a nice day.   But most years my father does not die.  He passed away in April and since then I have been helping my mother and dealing with a pandemic so the cars got pushed on the back burner.  But it is the last day of spring so technically it is still spring maintenance.  This year I decided to go through the entire Tune Up chapter of the service manual (Section C if you are following along in your copy of the service manual).  I will put the subsection  numbers in as I go

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Frustrating day…

Posted on by nvonada

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This morning I decided to get the Jeepster running right.  I hooked up a vacuum gauge and time light and started the engine.  It fired right up.  I warmed up the engine then tried to get the low idle right.  The engine ran like crap at low RPM but I got the timing nailed and went to adjust the mixture.  As soon as I tried to turn one of the mixture knobs the engine died and would not run at all.  I was just about to rip the carb apart then I decided to try spraying some carb cleaner in there.  Surprisingly that worked.  I was just starting on tweaking the idle mixture when I realized the inductive pickup from the timing light had fallen on the exhaust manifold.

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Dammit!  I have had this timing light since I was a teenager and have never damaged it on an engine.  It still works but I am using a bit of twist-tie to hold it on the spark plug wire.  At this point it was getting really hot in the garage and I was tired for fighting with this engine so I just shut it down.

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I also saw that a bunch of crap was in the fuel filter.  I flushed everything out except the fuel pump and the stupid little gas tank I am using.  I cleaned out the filter.  All I need is more crap in the carb.

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Rachael and I have been making progress on cleaning up the fuel tank area.  The undercoating did its job well and the rust is pretty minimal in the undercoated areas.  But they did not do a good job getting undercoating in a lot of areas like the reinforcement bits that run across the body.

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More clean and unclean areas.  We have found the secret to getting the undercoating off is heat.  We warm the area for 5-10 seconds with a propane torch then peel the undercoating off with a putty knife.

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There are a lot of blind and hard to get to areas too.  This one is on either side of the rear crossmember and the rear bumper bolts go in the shinier hole down there.

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Here Rachael is using a rust converter product on all the gas tank and bumper brackets.  After they dry we will paint them.

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Just in time too.  The new gas tank showed up today.  It looks a hell of a lot better than the old one.